Hello Skkawliens! Welcome to our Maker Faire Bay Area 2019 (MFBA19) Workshop coverage. In this post we share our experience from the Handcrafting Soft Circuits Workshop, Light-up Cosplay Workshop and Easy Screenprinting with Vinyl Workshop. It’s not everyday you get hands on instruction from some of the most skilled and talented Makers around, so we certainly took take advantage of it. Check our coverage below.
Handcrafting Soft Circuits
This workshop focused on ways to learn about circuits using paper craft. The workshop covered a brief introduction to circuits including the basic components of a circuit and circuit types. We were provided some basic materials including a 3-volt battery, copper tape, a couple LEDs and a paper guide sheet, shown below.
We were then instructed to apply the copper tape onto the paper, following the printed guide on the sheet to complete the circuits. We were tasked to make a Simple Circuit, one LED connected in series, and a Parallel Circuit, two LEDs connected in parallel. Samples of our work are shown below.
After that, we were asked to get creative and make our own Paper Circuit creation. In the succeeding couple of photos, you can see the light-up origami crane we made with Étienne, whom we had just met at the convention. He had graciously helped us work on our project. See below.
This workshop was a great way to learn about the basics of circuits. We can see why this handcrafting with soft circuits is a very popular way to teach children the basics of electronics. We had a lot of fun as well! You can learn more about this workshop from the Maker Faire website here.
Light-up Cosplay
Bumping it up a notch, the next workshop we attended was about how to make your own light-up Cosplay. The aim of this workshop was to introduce you to the basics of light-up cosplay by building your own glowing wrist/bracer. In this workshop, we were provided some pre-cut EVA foam, LEDs, some 3-volt batteries, shoelace and conductive thread.
This build was a little more involved, and we won’t go into the details here. Suffice it to say that we were carefully instructed on how to apply the LEDs, conductive thread and 3-volt battery in the EVA foam to make our own light-up wrist/bracer. We documented some of the steps in our photo collage below.
It definitely was a cool way to get started into light-up cosplaying. It was also really helpful to have an instructor walk us through the creation process. From the above, you can see Étienne did a great job building his very own light-up wrist/bracer. Below, you can see he’s totally rocking the light-up bracer look!
Great job Étienne! Want to know more about this Workshop? check out the workshop background at the Maker Faire website here.
Easy Screenprinting with Vinyl
The last, but certainly not the least, was the screen printing with vinyl workshop. The aim of this workshop was to teach you how you can design and create your own Do-It-Yourself screenprinting studio at home. Like our earlier workshops, we were provided with some basic materials to get us started. This included screens, ink, a squeegee, vinyl paper, and some sample cloth/textiles.
This workshop was a little bit more ad-hoc since we encountered some technical difficulties, but our instructor was able to show us how easy it is to make your own screenprint studio. As a simple exercise, a few of us cut some simple shapes from vinyl and applied that to the screen. Once we were happy with our screen design, we applied some paint on the silkscreen and used the squeegee to evenly apply the paint on some sample cloth. See below:
The whole process only took a few minutes and was it was certainly easier than we all thought it would be. For sure a great weekend project for any budding printer-maker. If you want to learn more about this workshop you can check out the background info here. Also, you can contact Christne Adame, our instructor for this workshop, if you’d like to now more.
Alas, we wish we could have attended more workshops! We hope you enjoyed our workshop coverage of the Maker Faire Bay Area 2019. We sure did!
What, that wasn’t enough Maker Faire coverage for you? If that’s the case, you can find a list of our Maker Faire Bay Area 2019 Coverage below:
- Maker Faire Bay Area 2019
- Show Floor Highlights @Maker Faire Bay Area 2019
- Cosplay Experience @Maker Faire Bay Area 2019
- Mech Warfare @Maker Faire Bay Area 2019
For more on Geek Culture and Technology, keep following us here at Skkaw.Blog!
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