Maker Faire, part 5
As one would expect at a faire, there were faire rides and merry-go-rounds. Supposedly they were all homemade? The amazing thing about them was that (I may be wrong on this) none of them ran on electric power. The ones I saw were all pedal-powered. Sure, these merry-go-rounds were nothing like roller-coasters in industrial entertainment parks, but they also required more active participation on the rider's part than simply giving in to mercy of the centrifugal force. And some of them, like this circular see-saw, managed to frighten some riders. Apparently, pedaling was less trivial than they thought. It got me wondering, by the way -- do the riders all need to pedal synchronously, in phase and at the same speed? What happens if one of them slacks off or falls out of phase? :-)
(I didn't go on any of the rides, I must say. I'm way too uncoordinated for that. One look at them makes me lose my balance. :-))
And this rolling wheel was just stunning, but I wasn't sure if it could move on its own, or if it needed to be pushed. In this picture, a bunch of people are pushing it, but maybe just because they need to help it up the hill?
More than anything else in this Faire, the merry-go-rounds and the modified cars left me optimistic in general about the ability of western civilization to survive the looming energy crisis. Oil may run out one day, but human ingenuity is under no such threat, it seems.
And then there was a part of Maker Faire that I won't go into detail about, because I still feel pained about my inability to participate in it.
Swap-o-Rama-Rama was a two-day event where you were supposed to be able to drop off your used clothing and be taught, or inspired, create new, reconstructed clothes out of stuff people dropped off. I didn't even go to check it out, because I knew it would ignite in me an ache to start making clothes again. Sewing and knitting were my major hobbies in high school and college. They were prompted by necessity: in the time and place I grew up, stylish or original clothes were not available in stores. So there was a sizeable subculture of people (well, women anyway) who made their own clothes. In college, I spent a class after an endless, boring class surreptitiously knitting under the desk, instead of taking notes. :-) I also sewed a lot of my own clothes. Their aesthetic qualities were rather questionable, but they sure were original, because I got a lot of looks on the street. And not of a good kind. More like "huh?" :-)
(The fact that I could not be bothered to make patterns for my clothes -- I "measured" the fabric by eyeballing it -- probably speaks volumes about the quality of my handmade clothes. In any case, I stopped making my own clothes about the same time I graduated from college. What looks weird-cute on a teenage chick is merely weird on a woman in her twenties. :-))
But I long to get back into clothesmaking, even though I know that my priorities being as they are (writing trumps all other spare time pursuits), I probably never will. Even more than general sewing / knitting, I would like to make costumes. Since occasions for wearing a costume don't come up very often, that's probably more realistic. Still, I haven't made any firm efforts to get into costuming. And today is one of those (rare) days when I'm actually sad about it. It's Halloween, of course, and an absence of costumes in my life is felt more strongly than ever. But so is the absence of some other things. While people are reveling on 6th street, I'm holed up at home, working. I didn't even take my child trick-or-treating. I have a deadline that's been pushed back a week, but is still breathing down my neck; Steve is out-of-town on a business trip, and his mom is in the rehab recovering from her broken pelvic bone. That's the true, non-sugar-coated Halloween spirit: the only ghosts visiting me are those of abandoned dreams from the past. :-)
(I didn't go on any of the rides, I must say. I'm way too uncoordinated for that. One look at them makes me lose my balance. :-))
And this rolling wheel was just stunning, but I wasn't sure if it could move on its own, or if it needed to be pushed. In this picture, a bunch of people are pushing it, but maybe just because they need to help it up the hill?
More than anything else in this Faire, the merry-go-rounds and the modified cars left me optimistic in general about the ability of western civilization to survive the looming energy crisis. Oil may run out one day, but human ingenuity is under no such threat, it seems.
And then there was a part of Maker Faire that I won't go into detail about, because I still feel pained about my inability to participate in it.
Swap-o-Rama-Rama was a two-day event where you were supposed to be able to drop off your used clothing and be taught, or inspired, create new, reconstructed clothes out of stuff people dropped off. I didn't even go to check it out, because I knew it would ignite in me an ache to start making clothes again. Sewing and knitting were my major hobbies in high school and college. They were prompted by necessity: in the time and place I grew up, stylish or original clothes were not available in stores. So there was a sizeable subculture of people (well, women anyway) who made their own clothes. In college, I spent a class after an endless, boring class surreptitiously knitting under the desk, instead of taking notes. :-) I also sewed a lot of my own clothes. Their aesthetic qualities were rather questionable, but they sure were original, because I got a lot of looks on the street. And not of a good kind. More like "huh?" :-)
(The fact that I could not be bothered to make patterns for my clothes -- I "measured" the fabric by eyeballing it -- probably speaks volumes about the quality of my handmade clothes. In any case, I stopped making my own clothes about the same time I graduated from college. What looks weird-cute on a teenage chick is merely weird on a woman in her twenties. :-))
But I long to get back into clothesmaking, even though I know that my priorities being as they are (writing trumps all other spare time pursuits), I probably never will. Even more than general sewing / knitting, I would like to make costumes. Since occasions for wearing a costume don't come up very often, that's probably more realistic. Still, I haven't made any firm efforts to get into costuming. And today is one of those (rare) days when I'm actually sad about it. It's Halloween, of course, and an absence of costumes in my life is felt more strongly than ever. But so is the absence of some other things. While people are reveling on 6th street, I'm holed up at home, working. I didn't even take my child trick-or-treating. I have a deadline that's been pushed back a week, but is still breathing down my neck; Steve is out-of-town on a business trip, and his mom is in the rehab recovering from her broken pelvic bone. That's the true, non-sugar-coated Halloween spirit: the only ghosts visiting me are those of abandoned dreams from the past. :-)