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Craft Night quilt at MakerFaire2013

Dublin Mini Maker Faire logo Dublin Mini Maker Faire 2013 has come and gone. We’ve been recapping a few of the projects displayed at the event, like the Bubble Bird House, and the Twitter Knitter. The Craft Nighters* got in on the action as well, and contributed squares towards a patchwork quilt. The type of squares is varied, including crochet, hand knit, machine knit, embroidery, blackwork, patchwork (meta), and decorative uses of beads, buttons, and googly eyes. Rather than losing some of the detail by making them conform to a strict patchwork quilt, we instead chose a looser arrangement to better showcase the talent and variety of our dedicated crafters.

Crafters quilt at Maker Faire, with Twitter Knitter

* Craft Night happens every second Tuesday from 7pm. It’s free, and open to all crafts. Simply, people show up and work on their projects. It’s great having others around who can help you out if you get stuck/confused, or just to chat with (and find out the best crafting suppliers). Get in touch and come along!

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Crochet for not-quite beginners – Sat 17th August

So you started to crochet, but never quite got further than a square that turned into a triangle? This is the class for you. We’ll look at some further techniques, such as crochet in the round starting with a magic circle and stitches for decreasing.  During the class you’ll get a reminder of the basics, and then we’ll make a sphere, which combines increases with decreases and is a great starting point for making hats or amigurumi toys.

Giant Granny Square
We’ll be moving on from here

 

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Bubble Birdhouse

We have been working on projects that all went down really well at Maker Faire this year and will be working on over the coming months to improve as we go along.

One project that I worked on with another member is the Bubble Birdhouse.

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It all started with some messing/science trying to make bubbles from washing up liquid and seeing what components are needed for a good bubble. Then trying to replicate what the commercial machines can do but build your own. Once we had this almost cracked we worked to scale up the project as we did for street performers event. We learned that children like to stick fingers into every bubble that comes out of the machine, so we came up with solutions for this.

We put it 6 foot off the ground, this was a really amazing experience to see how children and adults are drawn to bubbles.

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Next stage is to take it all apart and redesign it from scratch like every project; rebuild and improve as we go along.

If you want to see the Bubble Birdhouse in action check out the end of this news piece.

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August Brewday

Capital Brewers return to Tog this (& every) 2nd Sunday of the month.

 

Hearty  brews are on the menu, in both brewing with guidance and instructions from the experts, and tasting craft beer made earlier!

There will also be some talks on matters important to brewing, such as water purification.

 

Its always a fun and engaging day, the cost is free (donations are welcome) so come along!

 

Capital brewers discussion is here, and pictures of our previous brewdays can be found here.

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Workshop: Your First Ruby on Rails App!

Ruby is the language and Rails is the framework that stopped people yawning at web development, encouraged coders to try and better themselves as developers and is now the first choice for an overwhelming number of startups, as well as lots of forward looking enterprises. In this 3 hour introduction, Declan McGrath (aka @theirishpenguin) from Intercom will guide you through the same thing all those people had to do – build your first Ruby on Rails application.

We’ll start with a look at Ruby and its syntax before walking our way through the models, views and controllers that comprise a Rails project. By the end of this evening you should know your routes from your database migrations and have a starting point to go on and build other Rails applications.

Pre-requisites:

  • Course level – you’ll be expected to have a bit of an understanding of programming already. This is *not* an intro to programming course. Having said that we will be sticking with the basics of Ruby – so if you’ve written a few programs before in any language then you should be able follow along 🙂
  • There won’t be time to install Ruby and Rails on your computer on the night. So you’ll have to have it installed before arrival. You’ll need Ruby 1.9.3 and Rails 3.2.14 installed along with sqlite (which let’s us store data). If you’ve any questions on installing the post a comment on this Ruby Ireland Googlegroup thread
  • Basic knowledge of HTML

When: Thursday, August 8th. From 7pm till 10pm.

Cost: €5 for non-members, free for members

Please sign up using the form below. Updated to add: We’re full! Thanks for the interest everyone.

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