Maker Faire 2009

Woohoo, we actually made it out of the house on a full day family excursion. Seems like it has been ages and ages. And what a day it was going to the Maker Faire (put on by the publisher of Make Magazine and Craft Magazine). It was such a well-run festival event, so inspiring, mind-boggling, entertaining and even yes educational.

We didn't get to see these battle bots actually battling, but aren't they cool?

There were a lot of art-cars driving around that we saw, it was hard to get pictures without people walking in front, it was pretty crowded, but here are some of my faves.

A lot of these seemed to be carrying people around that wanted a ride, how fun is this one?

This was an Obama mover, the front part was Obama holding a flag and walking on robotic legs, and basically moving the whole cart forward. Weird!

I think I loved this one the most, especially because it shot fire out of the antennae. It reminded me of Dr. Doolittle.

There was a whole section of Steampunk, which my son Alex is really interested in. It is really imaginative stuff, people cosplay in these cool outfits and make very unusual things.

An amazing looking guitar.

But this motorcycle was the best. It is propane powered, but had a steam powered whistle. The couple I saw riding it looked like they were having fun, but I didn't get their picture.

Look at the detail on this dashboard, impressive!

I loved all the details on this, especially the tail pipe.

Not sure if this is considered Steampunk or not, but she was attracting a pretty big crowd of kids that wanted to go under the skirt, cute.

Inside one of the expo halls, Etsy had a display table. I had to take this picture of the soft-sculpture frog dissection since my son is currently doing that in Biology class. Ewwww remember the smell of formaldehyde?

There were of course, lots and lots of robots including these two famous ones

He even moved!And they sold the plans to make your own...

There were a lot of LED and light-art, this one was always moving.

Instructables had a great table, with this one fun thing to look at, inside was an LED google logo spinning around. Alex did it,

Then he said I had to look, he wouldn't tell me what was in there!


This was an automatic rim-shot device. Bah-du-bump.

Amazing art made out of recyclables

We also got to see a life-sized Mousetrap,which was too cool and I wasn't in a good spot to take pictures, but go check out the website. I loved playing that game as a kid, it was so hard to get it to actually work, but it sure was fun trying.

The most hair-raising thing was this enormous Tesla Coil, wowee it was thrilling! Like standing next to a lightning storm.

I didn't take pictures of the Swaparamarama because I was too into it, super fun. I'll show you what I made in another post.

So my advice is if you live near one of the Maker Faire locations, you should absolutely go and take your family with you.