The Yellow Brick Road: Maker's Fair

Imagination is more important than knowledge, for whilst knowledge points to all there is, imagination points to all there could be. Albert Einstein

I love being inspired. I wish however that inspiration would instantly manifest itself into know how and motivation. This past weekend we attended a fair in Austin called, “The Maker’s Fair” and as Kate so astutely pointed out, was a celebration of uber-dorkiness. It was a gathering of people who like to make things, all kinds of things, from the crafty to the highly technical field of robotics. The first demonstration we encountered was one of lightening and music. As the music played so did the lightening dance. (video here, must go to blog to see)

An empty cage adjacent to the dancing lightening, was a reminder of the robot wars that were happen later in the day. The next stop was to laugh at the singing bass car. You have seen the hilarious singing bass that can be hung on the wall; well this car was covered in them. Not only that, they were all programmed to sing the same song at the exact same time. It could be described either as very tacky or ingeniously creative!

Our next encounter was with two women building an outdoor oven; the kind of oven that one identifies with Native Americans or great tasting bread. We even helped a little, grabbing handfuls of sand/dirt mixture to add to the mound. Kyle and I love to do projects together, making the haunted house with our own two hands was entertaining and rewarding. We have decided that once we have settled down, we are going to make one of these awesome ovens, have an amazing bread cookout and everyone will be invited! We’ll let you know when that happens.

Some of the other cool things we saw were knitted shoes, homemade roller skates from old shoes, huge hulla-hoops, a human-size mouse trap which took 13 years and $12,000 to make, a robot that shot marshmallows and a pyromaniac dream show, with fire exploding from a fire hydrant among other things. And of course the fair wouldn’t be complete without vendors, but not your typical vendors, Austinite vendors with flair. I wanted so badly to be in the business of shopping, but because I have no money, shopping is not an option at this point. There were so many creative crafts, jewelry made entirely from vintage type-writer keys, fury bear hats, feather headbands, I was in maker’s heaven. Being in the presence of such creative energy, I felt sparks flying every which direction, the ideas, and possibilities were limitless. One of our last stops of the day was in the scrap barn. Piles upon piles of clothing were provided without cost, but your goal was not to take the old, used clothing and wear it as is, but to improve upon it. The options included not only picking from about 10 different patterns for screen-printing (imprinting a cut out image with special paint onto cloth) but also at least 10 sewing machines and buckets of scraps were provided for endless hours of fun redesigning clothing. We were in a rush to make our Houston party with the Leslie and Peter, so we weren’t able to have endless amounts of fun, but Kyle found a jacket with which he had imprinted an umbrella on the front and jellyfish on the back, while Kate found me a pink express shirt with which I imprinted an abstract image onto. We could have spent the day just in that tent, but alas, we had more fun to attend to in H town. But here’s to hoping inspiration never ends.