We missed the very first Maker Faire in San Francisco in 2006, but we’ve been going to as many Maker Faires as possible since 2007 – big ones like Detroit, San Francisco, and New York, and small ones like the Lewiston/Auburn Mini-Maker Faire near our home base in Buckfield, Maine.
Why do we go?
Maker Faires are a fabulous mix of creativity, home-brewed engineering, old-school crafts, and new-school robotics, not to mention Arduino hackers, paper airplane gurus, yarn bombers, 3-D printers, and Star Wars fans.
And every time it’s new.
Every time, we come home from Maker Faire full of new ideas and new inspirations. And the EepyBird laboratory is now home to an amazing three-foot-tall, glowing, enameled, steel jellyfish sculpture, a set of 800 plastic Strawbee drinking straw construction connectors, and a small elephant sculpture made from an expertly-bent, but otherwise unbroken and ordinary, wire coat hanger. Each was acquired at a different Maker Faire – because Fritz couldn’t live without them.
We go to Maker Faire not only to see surprising things like those, but to meet and talk to the people who create them. Maker Faire is amazing for the collection of cool, fun, and fascinating inventions people bring to show, but to us, the most important part, the real power of every Maker Faire and of the global Maker Movement, is the openness the Makers bring to the event. It’s not so much about, ”Look at the cool stuff I made!” as it is about, “Here’s the cool stuff I made – and here’s how you can make one, too!” That attitude makes Maker Faire one of our favorite places to be. Ever.
So we’ll see you at Maker Faire Detroit! Come see us drop 500 Mentos into 100 bottles of Coke to create huge geysers, all set to music, right in front of the Henry Ford Museum.
And you definitely should make your own Coke & Mentos geysers, too! You’ll find complete instructions right here.
EepyBird will be performing at Maker Faire Detroit on Saturday and Sunday, July 26th and 27th, at 4pm each day.
By Stephen Voltz and Fritz Grobe, EepyBird, AKA, the Coke & Mentos guys.
