Tag Archives: ornaments

Holiday Make-A-Thon Recap

Posted on by Pete Prodoehl

Holiday Make-A-Thon

We hosted this year’s Holiday Make-A-Thon on Friday, November 29th, 2013 and it was a big bundle of fun! Lots of people came and we helped them make thing. Lots of members showed up to volunteer their time sharing the maker ethos with the folks of Milwaukee, and that was great to see and be a part of.

Tom makes some ornaments

Besides our CNC cut ornaments from previous years, new member Tom showed people how to fold a diamond-shaped ornament using paper. (He even put a tree together out of pink foam Tuesday night after the meeting just so we’d have something to hang the ornaments on.) For the CNC and laser-cut ornaments we had the typical paint, glitter-glue, and googly eyes for decorating.

Learn to solder

There was also soldering using our tie-pin kit. Under close supervision, even kids are able to assemble this kit, which includes some surface mount soldering.

Jenie does some printmaking

Local printmaker Jenie Gao joined us to help people make blockprint holiday cards, and we also had crowns made from felt, melty-crayon ornaments, pet collars, necklaces, beads, bracelets, and my own personal favorite…

Make-A-Thon

Laser-cut ornaments that we let people design! We used Snowflake 2.0 from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories which is a super-easy to use Processing application that lets you design a snowflake. We had two computers set up and we helped people do the design work, and then Lance would laser cut them from 3mm Baltic Birch wood. People could then decorate the snowflake they designed.

All in all, this was a great event. People came in and saw the space, made things for the holidays, and all of our members who volunteered seemed to have fun as well. A big ol’ thanks to everyone who showed up and made it a spectacular day of making!

Holiday Make-A-Thon 2011 Photos

Posted on by Pete Prodoehl

Wow! We had a great turnout at the Holiday Make-A-Thon, and besides teaching people to solder, and providing blank ornaments to decorate, we just generally had a good time.

Here’s some photos from the event:

Soldering

Here’s Royce teaching someone to solder with our Tie Pin Kit. We plan to have these at all the events we participate in so we can show people how easy it is to get into soldering.

Ornaments

Here’s Brant working on some ornaments. We used the CNC Router to cut out a bunch of different shapes for people to decorate.

Ornaments

Here’s a collection of finished ornaments.

Penguin

Here’s a dried gourd that was transformed into an awesome penguin.

Some crazy looking reindeer Brant made out of scraps from one of my projects…

And finally… Starclops. (Does Starclops really need any sort of explanation? I think not.)

Thanks to everyone who came out to make this event awesome!