Maker Faire brings together such an interesting assortment of people with different backgrounds, skills, and goals. The last newsletter presented three makers who are coming to Maker Faire Bay Area this weekend, and this edition presents four more makers and their projects.

Please tell your friends and neighbors about Maker Faire Bay Area, which is September 26–28 at Mare Island Naval Shipyard.

Table of Contents

• Meet the Makers Maker Faire Bay Area

  • Anna Gribovsky - Aquatica

  • Taylor Pope and Megan Gardner of Fernside Dragons …

  • Sara Bolduc - Glow Plushies

  • Sam Mateosian - Spacebar Arcade

  • Becca Priddy - Dimensional Dreams

Meet the Makers Maker Faire Bay Area

Anna Gribovsky - Aquatica

Aquatica is a large-scale interactive installation that my crew and I made for Burning Man this year. Burning Man just took place. Aquatica is a 15-foot metal kelp tree made out of round tubing and 32 different resin jellyfish that have 800 LEDs throughout the jellies and the tree itself. The jelly is lit with LED rings and these little contraptions that hold the optical fiber tentacles. And so that’s what creates this beautiful light effect and these undulating glowing jellies look really good at night.

Luckily we’re gonna be in the Dark Room (at Maker Faire Bay Area) so that people who are coming can really get to experience the light effect.

Anna, was this the first version of the thing that you built or have you been working to get up to something this big and complex?

So it is the first version of this piece, but this is my second large-scale interactive installation. I made another one about two years ago called Apex of Azure, which is more of a futuristic stained glass pyramid with flame effects. The process is different each time and has its own complexities. There are new things you learn each time, but once you start fabricating large-scale installations, there’s some muscle memory.

Most importantly, there’s a community of makers. I work out of the Box Shop in San Francisco and there’s just so many experienced fabricators, fire artists, etc. I’m a painter by training and there’s a lot of skills to tap from. I had a really talented crew this year for Aquatica who helped me make this.

We had eight people on our crew, so I’m not just the only person who’s made this. And at the same time, yeah, this is like our first shot. You do it, you bring it, and hopefully it works.

I always wonder, what was it like the week before you went to Burning Man?

It was pretty much like a grueling marathon nonstop, really every day.

One benefit of events is to give people a deadline, that they have to get something done that they’ve been doing for a long time. You had a lot of unusual weather at Burning Man this year. Did Aquatica manage to survive the wind and rain and sandstorms?

Yes. This was shocking to me because these jellies are made out of resin and they have delicate electronics. We lost two jellies out of 32. It was an aquatic miracle.

Instagram link: Vskyarts
Website: https://www.vskyarts.com/

Taylor Pope and Megan Gardner of Fernside Dragons Custom Inflatables

Megan: We make our own yard inflatables. I grew up doing costumes and costuming and I did a lot of cosplay in my twenties, and just stopped for a while. Then, I got a house, got an inflatable yard dragon, and got another one . . . and wanted more. That didn’t exist. And so we got like an extra with a not real defined goal of “I’ll be able to turn this into something else.”

And then we just forgot about it for a little while and then Covid happened. We had a lot of extra time. And so we had a Christmas dragon that we converted into a Covid-19 first-responder dragon and put it out in front of our yard. And it was a huge hit with the neighbors. It was a great way to interact with people asynchronously when we just didn’t feel safe to be in the same airspace with other people.

But you could hear little kids come by and be like, “Mom, it’s a dragon!” It turns out that inflatables are not supposed to be out for eight weeks straight. The fabric can’t hold up. Especially if you get the ones that you get from Home Depot or Walmart.

Taylor: And especially the height of the summer when there’s a lot more UV.

Megan: Sometime in May or June, it ripped and I said I always wanted to figure out how to make my own, so I ripped it apart and used it as a pattern. I made a new one for Fourth of July, which only sort of worked. It turns out that the most important thing, which we learned very quickly, is that the fabric needs to be air impermeable.

We used the wrong fabric. I was ready to give up. I was so sad. I was like, I worked so hard on this thing, and each individual piece would inflate properly. So I’d make a wing and the wing would inflate and I’d make a head, and the head would inflate, but altogether it didn’t work. But Taylor was like, no, we just need to try again.

And so we tried again and we made another dragon, and another, and another, and we made one into a costume. And we are Dragon Con-ers — we go to Dragon Con in Atlanta, which is the same weekend as Burning Man — and so we made a dragon that’s the Dragon Con dragon.

So what’s the fabric? What’s the kind of secret to the fabric?

The fabric needs to be air impermeable. We use silicone-impregnated ripstop nylon. It’s the same type of material that you would use for backpacking tents. Very lightweight, very slippery fabric. So it’s difficult to sew. But I’ve been sewing it and pretty much nothing else for five years, so it feels pretty easy for me.

We have an 18-foot inflatable Nyan Cat and it packs down into a very small bag.

Megan, are you in the Bay Area?

Megan: Yes we are. We’re on the peninsula.

We’re so glad to have you coming to Maker Faire. I’d love to see you there with more of your dragons and other creatures.

Megan: A lot of people don’t realize that we make them. They think that we buy them. We have started a Discord to try to help people make their own. We’ve helped a handful of people make their own as well, which has been great to start it, to try to build a community to help people make things.

Can I ask what do you do for a living? What’s your day job?

We’re both software engineers, but neither one of us can do the other’s job.

That’s perfect.

Instagram link: Fernside Dragons

Sara Bolduc - Glow Plushies

I’m bringing Glow Plushies that light up.

This year, they’re sewable — in the past, they’ve been hot-glued. They’re just felt fabric with laser cut designs: a mouth or eyes and mustache, with different shapes. I’m a maker educator, and that’s what I've been doing since I graduated from college.

I stumbled upon Maker Faire. I think the first Faire I went to was back in 2010 and I realized I had found my people. I was working with kids then and at an Intel Computer Clubhouse, doing technology and art and then finding the maker world. It was like, oh this fits right in. Let’s start incorporating this.

And so fast-forward a few years. I moved around a bit and we opened a makerspace in Marin County called the Marin Makerspace, and I was working with kids there. We took kids to Maker Faire exhibiting as Young Makers from 2011 through 2014. And then back in 2018 and 2019; I think those were the last two years that we exhibited with kids.

And so the Glow Plushies was one of the projects I came up with for my students in the makerspace. I had a girls program called LunaTech. It was an afterschool program to get girls into technology specifically and keep them engaged. And all the girls at the time really loved to do drawing projects.

One of the kids drew this creature and I laser cut it. We asked what can we do with it? So we made it a plushy. I was like, “That’s cool!” We learned how to sew and then we were hot-gluing the pieces. I was like, what else can we do with it? We can add an LED and we learned about circuits and making a simple switch.

Through the years I’ve worked with schools and done these as biodiversity projects. What kind of creatures are they, what do they need in their habitats? Maybe they have big eyes, maybe you cut the ears off ’cause they don’t need to hear. Doing different shapes. What I’m bringing to Maker Faire is this Glow Plushy as a kit. And so I’m really excited to be making them again with kids and then selling them later.

How long does it take to make one?

It’s sewing this year, so it’ll be a little bit longer. We’re doing hand sewing. I have one where I was testing out the blanket stitch, but a simple running stitch will work.

It could take five minutes to sew around. And then stuffing and everything.

What’s the technical definition of a plushy?

That’s a good question — I don’t know!

Website: sarabolduc.com

Sam Mateosian - Spacebar Arcade

My project is called Spacebar and the giant arcade machine experience. And maybe as background to my sort of maker story I think it goes back to childhood.

My parents were “back-to-the-land”-ers. My dad had a garage, like a mechanic’s garage. He sold the garage and bought a yellow school bus in the seventies. He drove around the country and landed in the backwoods of Maine where he parked the bus, built a house, and did all sorts of things. He was a mechanic.

My mom made some of our clothes. They had a very nice garden and I grew up just tinkering in the garage and taking apart electronics and trying to put ’em back together. We turned that bus into a spaceship, and eventually I got a degree in computer science and I started a company doing software development. Ten years into that, I got bored of doing software for hire.

I started a new company around an idea of enabling people to make games. So it was kind of Roblox-inspired or Minecraft-inspired. Around the same time, I started a hacker/maker club in the “original” Portland — Portland, Maine. And that attracted like a whole bunch of like-minded weirdos who were into Arduino and robotics and AI, all playing around with all that stuff and just seeing what we could come up with.

Virtual reality came into the mix around that time. I spent a while trying a bunch of different things with that crew of people who I met just collaboratively in that like hacker/maker environment. Around eight years ago I moved out to the Bay Area. That’s where I am now. I’m here on the Meta campus today, One Hacker Way, for the reveal of whatever new smart glasses they’ve come up with.

My project that brought me to Maker Faire is this thing called Spacebar and the idea was basically a virtual barcade. It’s a multiplayer, multi-game social hangout space. The gimmick was that you could go inside of the game machines in the bar, sort of Tron-style, right? You would get teleported inside of the Pac-Man machine and you’d see the player as being giant on the outside, and you’d be inside the machine running around.

That was like the vision. I was at SIGGRAPH in LA and I was telling my buddy Vlad, who’s also a maker guy, about this idea. He was like, if you ever exhibit this thing, you should make a giant arcade machine that people can go inside, and that’ll bring this whole idea to life for the real world.

I was like, oh, that’s a really cool idea. Crazy, but pretty cool. I was talking to a friend about going to the Augmented World Expo, which is a big AR/VR conference. I pitched him this idea: We will build a giant arcade machine that people can go inside of.

He said, “You should do it!” So I had AI generate an image of this giant arcade machine, and I sent that to him and he was like, yep, awesome. You’re in. Let’s do it. So by the time that they had accepted the proposal, it was like three months from the event.

There’s a ton of design work to do. After I’d done that, there was like a month left to build the thing. And so miraculously, through a great, community initiative — all my neighbors and friends, and my kids and their kids — we built this giant arcade machine.

So the game takes place mostly inside of VR, although you can play from outside of VR using the giant screen. This was one of those moments of serendipity. Partway through building this thing, we realized that we’ve got no way to interact with the giant screen. The controls for it would be like 12 feet high. What are we gonna do? I was at a meetup and this guy walks in with this device that is based on an open-source project called PINSIM. It’s like the front seven inches of a pinball machine, but also it’s got some joysticks and some buttons on top. He had 3D printed the case at his shop. I said, this is perfect, this is what I need. And so we incorporated the PINSIM into the giant arcade machine experience. It’s the black box with the controller.

Then I decide that I’m gonna make a pinball game specifically for the Spacebar. The idea was always to have somebody playing inside and somebody playing outside. We came up with a concept where the player on the inside would be shooting cannons from inside of the pinball table at the player on the outside. And the player on the outside would have to dodge the rockets while operating the pinball table.

We put together that demo of a two-player machine and that’s the experience that we’ll be bringing and sharing with you at Maker Faire.

@mateosian

The Spacebar Giant Arcade Machine Experience is returning to the Bay Area Maker Faire this September 26-28! See you there! #vr #maker #arcade

Becca Priddy - Dimensional Dreams

I’m in Portland and I am bringing one of my Dimensional Dreams projects, which are very detailed shadow boxes like this one from my original series that has about 300 LEDs in it. But I’m bringing a much larger one.

The one that I’m bringing is my Coral Reef. It’s four-feet wide by four-feet tall and it’s three-feet deep; it’s very large. I started making these in 2017 or 2018.

What was your inspiration?

I’m a middle-school special-education teacher.

At the time, I was a behavior specialist and we were teaching about mindfulness and meditation and how it can help with mental health.

I teach in a Title I school. It’s a very impoverished school. One of the first things that you do when you’re teaching mindfulness is think of your happy place. A lot of my students don’t have a happy place. They may not have had the opportunity to have much of a childhood or a happy place.

At the same time I was developing these art projects, I said that I’m gonna build my happy place and then I’m gonna share it with my students. So the very first one was a shadow box of a photograph that I had taken at Superstition Mountain in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s where I’m from and it has saguaros and the mountains.

I figured out how to do lighting. Dimensional Dreams really helped me figure all these things out. This wasn’t what I went to school for. I went to school for theater and lighting design and education and biology. I went to school a lot. But I was inspired by the colors of the sunset and the desert.

I brought the box in to my school, the Superstition Mountain one, and my students sat in front of it and they were just staring off into space. I said, so what are you thinking about? And they said, “Nothing.” I said that’s meditation. So I collaborated with other artists and we found what is your happy place.

I made a whole series of these smaller boxes. And then I had been bringing those smaller boxes to Burning Man and Portland Winter Light Festival, and a few other events. I brought them to the Portland Mini Maker Faire before Covid. Then I said, I really wanna make a big one, and that was a bit of a learning curve, making something that large. Everything is laser-cut, so I needed a larger laser with a pass through. I needed larger tools. I made it twice because the first time I made it, it was on a little table saw in my backyard and it didn’t work very well.

But that means that I got to connect with other people. I met somebody who had a really large CNC and we got to sit down and make it together. And so being a maker has allowed me to learn these new skills and collaborate with other artists and other makers. I almost feel like I should have been an engineer now that I'm making all of these things.

It’s interesting from my perspective to come at engineering from an artist perspective. When I meet other makers, they’re like, “Wait, you know what you want it to look like and do before you make it?” I’m like, yeah.

It’s very interesting to be at that intersection of art and engineering. Look at Leonardo da Vinci. We’ve been doing this for hundreds of years. I think that it’s fun and it’s messy.

Instagram link: shinydesignlab

Make Things is a weekly newsletter for the Maker community from Make:. This newsletter lives on the web at makethings.make.co

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