Kari Chapin's Handmade Marketplace

Lets file this under the "Better Late than Never" category...

I can't believe that I missed the blog post that author and crafter Kari Chapin posted in May after visiting Maker Faire:NC.  Kari came down from Massachusets to our event as part of her book tour promoting her well-loved title The Handmade Marketplace: How to Sell Your Crafts Locally, Globally, and On-Line (totally non-commercial link to Amazon... we don't make a dime!).

Kari and the totally awesome Megan Risley shared a space in the sweltering sauna section of Maker Faire:NC.  After returning to her home in Massachusets, Kari posted a very nice account including some great photos of her visit to North Carolina that I thought you all might like to read.

Thanks for coming, Kari! I hope we'll see you next year promoting your latest opus!

One Possible Future for the Pop-Up Book

This is an advertisement for the Alice App recently released on Apple's iPad.  The application was developed by Atomic Antelope Ltd. and can be purchased for $8.99.  It looks like a fun way to read a fun story to the short ones in your life.  Sadly there are only 52 pages.

Book Suggestion: Eccentric Cubicle by Kaden Harris

RUN (or drive safely) to your nearest book merchant and purchase Eccentric Cubicle by Kaden Harris.  This book is a how-to manual for making some fantastic projects that you can use to decorate your office, home, studio, or workshop.

Just Some of the included projects are:

• A mechanical golfer
• Lucid dreaming induction device
• USB-powered bubble blower
• Fog machine
• A desktop guillotine

What's possibly even cooler than the projects themselves is the instructional wisdom that comes from a veteran maker.  Kaden Harris is a FULL-TIME maker/artist that makes antiques from a parallel universe: museum-quality miniature catapults and machina arcana, handcrafted corporate gifts, and executive rewards.

Tinkering and Maker Culture on the Rise

Allow me to exercise one of my new-found writing talents harvested from @FakeAPStylebook: Big Ups to the Wall Street Journal's Andy Jordan for pointing me to this article by Justin Lahart.  Mr. Lahart eloquently describes the blossoming Maker movement.  When you spend your days at work and devote your evenings to your various projects it's easy to miss the size of the trend.

Mr. Lahart has interviewed luminaries from many (US) hackerspaces, clubs, and universities and provides us with a forest-level view of what many of us might think is a small niche.

For the local slant and for some more on the rise of the tinkerer class read Marc Maximov's article in The Independent published back in September.  Mr. Maximov goes beyond the somewhat vanilla content in Mr. Lahart's article and attempts to determine the all-important why of the movement.

"It's been suggested that the developed world's modern, passive lifestyle—in which we're fixated on computer screens and tethered to our desks—squelches our instinctual drive to make things with our hands and contributes to depression." Maximov

Maximov also cites Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford as someone urging the case for working with your hands: something real.  Crawford's book digs far deeper and does an excellent job of reasoning that, essentially, to know you must do.