This is a live blog from Maker Faire Kansas City. I’ll be uploading images and information all day long, so keep refreshing this page for more! I’ll put the newest stuff at the top.
And that’s a wrap! The 7th year for Maker Faire Kansas City is over and was a huge success. I’m already looking forward to next year!
I learned a bit about raku pottery by watching the process. It is pretty wild watching how he got these patterns. They’re not painted on or anything, it has to do with the process of firing them in the kiln.
The Kansas City Woodworkers Guild brought some beautiful work and a giant pile of little truck kits for people to build.
Mercury Bell made all these incredible papercraft projects based on math and geometry. Some of it, she programmed with scratch before cutting using a machine.
Hal was watching Mercury’s table while she was away and he just happened to have a plastic bag on his head. There’s no real reason, it’s just something that happens at Maker Faire.
Behind Mercury’s table was this giant blanket fort brought by Matt Bell (Mercury’s dad). It was difficult to capture the scale of this, but you can get a rough estimate looking at Matt here
Kinsey was demoing how she creates these costumes from scratch; building up the structures from foam before hand sewing the fur over everything.
Michael Curry showed up with this rideable atomic bomb. It is largely 3d printed, though some parts were made from fiberglass for a bit more structural integrity.
If you're looking for some fun and a delicious snack, come run in the Snow Cone Hamster Wheel!! #makerfairkc pic.twitter.com/ZyXvMFdW2u
— MakerFaire KC (@makerfairekc) June 25, 2017
Electronic Jewelry is pretty awesome, but battery life can sometimes be a real downer. The folks at Lumen Electronic Jewelry incorporate tiny solar panels that let your jewelry recharge without needing to be plugged in. Their designs are incredible looking too!
JeDunn construction always does such a fantastic job. Kids put on a hard hat and a vest and get to enter the work zone (behind the big orange dividers) and make something. This area is always packed!
Klazzy Krea8tions was making these adorable custom dresses as people waited. How cool is it to get an outfit made right in front of you?
Spotted Yandu from Guardians of the Galaxy wandering around!
You really can’t go wrong with a roving dixie land band!
FIRST Robotics has a big presence at Maker Faire Kansas City. They’ve got many teams all set up doing a demonstration of what their competitions are like. In this example, the bots are having to collect a cog from one end of the arena and place it on a pole at the center, where the person pulls it up and mounts it in place.
Walk up, get your picture taken, and take away a “candy selfie” in 5 minutes. That’s what Melissa is offering with her incredible 3D candy printer. She says businesses all over the world are starting to use these to draw a crowd and deliver something that everyone loves, candy. The interface was extremely simple and intuitive and all designs are printed in less than 5 minutes. She concedes that you loose a little bit of print quality by insisting on getting it done in 5 minutes, but that the quick timing is very important to the overall experience. If you had to wait an hour or two for a better print, you wouldn’t stick around! I didn’t get a picture of their contact info, so go to their site for more.
Johanna Miller’s brightly colored yarns drew me in from pretty far a way. I just wanted to lay down in all the wonderful wool.
Frustrated by the current offerings of fancy light materials for costuming, these two started Hikari Lights. They have taken care to create electroluminescent materials, called EL tape or EL wire that is much better for use in costumes. They showed me how they completely re-did the connectors and found different shapes and formats that work better for sewing
They had a dark room set up where people can do real-time light painting. This was super fun to watch.
Chelsea is here doing wood burning by hand. I thought these were laser cut designs at first and she says that she’ll have tons of people make that mistake today. Her designs were extremely precise and very impressive.
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Here are a few random moments from yesterday that I really enjoyed. Look forward to more fun as soon as the gates open today!
There were even famous vehicles here from groups that enjoy recreating movie cars. The “Mutt Cutts” van was my personal favorite. I would drive that shaggy beast anywhere!
One of the first things I noticed was there there are tons of costumes and cosplayers here in Kansas City. There are all kinds of interesting characters wandering around, welcoming photo opportunities as well as tables showing how the different types of costumes are made. Toward the end of the day I got to host a fun gathering of some of the costumed makers where they could strut their stuff for the crowd. This was so much fun and I could see this growing and becoming a much larger part of the maker faire. We only had about 1/5th of the costumed attendees on stage!
Day two of Maker Faire Kansas City is about to begin and I’m very excited. Yesterday was an absolute blast and I had so much fun. Unfortunately, I had some technical issues so I couldn’t upload stuff to share on this blog. Today, I have everything fixed, so I should have updates flowing all day long.
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