East Bay Mini-Maker Faire

Our display table. Bea, Cookie, and me, getting
ready to start teaching.

     What do you get when you cross a science fair, a county fair, and a clean, G-rated version of Burning Man? You get Maker Faire. The brain-child of those crazy individuals at MAKE magazine, the first Maker Faire was held in the San Franciso Bay Area in 2006. Since that time, it's grown to 2 large Maker Faires (Bay Area and NYC), about 60 smaller, one-day "Mini Maker Faires," and a couple of international Maker Faires.
     Sunday, October 20 was the 4th East Bay Mini-Maker Faire (EBMMF), one of the oldest and largest of the one-day "minis." As Spindles and Flyers (one of my two spinning guilds) has been active in the Maker movement, and has done something at every EBMMF since the start, a small group of us showed up on Sunday morning to teach spinning on drop-spindles made out of dowels, cup hooks, rubber grommets, and used CDs. We worked hard, we taught a lot of people (around 200 people by my estimate), and we had fun.
     The Mini is a good warm-up for the big Maker Faire in May (May 17-18, 2014): I found we need a lot of space for teaching, and I'm toying with the idea of setting up a "restricted space" to demonstrate some fiber arts techniques that aren't as "kid friendly" as drop spindle spinning.

Step One: Getting the fiber ready to spin.
That's me, running the drum carder.

Step Two: Spinning. Lorah is demonstrating
how to draft to a young spinner.

Step Three: Plying. Jill is helping a young spinner
turn her spun yarn into a 2-ply yarn.