Oh My Gosh. Maker Faire.

The Maker Faire is this weekend, in San Mateo, California. It is a gigantic event. In fact, I'm not sure it's possible to take in all of it even if you were there for all of the hours it is open.

But here's what we mostly saw:

- Met the people of RAFT, or Resource Area For Teachers - they were teaching cool Japanese braiding and other things. They gather up materials for fabulous projects and then get them to teachers. You can even sponsor a teacher's membership. As the guy there said, "My wife is a teacher. She gets a million Peet's Coffee gift cards each year - then she turns around and uses her own money to get supplies for projects." So consider these guys next time you want to help a teacher, or hey, it's a fabulous end-of-year gift!!

- Made an Ewok sock puppet, and learned that Fabri-Tak is the best stuff for making puppets and gluing fabrics together - it's cold to the touch until it dries, and it dries fast and cleans up easily.

- Checked out cool moving sculptures by Applied Kinetic Arts - a lot of which was just beautiful. There were these robots with heads lit from inside and one sculpture with a whole scene that played out inside of it. I was really taken with those.

- Stood inside a soda bottle wave by Reuben Margolin while the steampunk lady reminded people not to touch it

- Hung out with the Electric Giraffe

- There were also tons of Legos, a guy who made both instruments and sculptures out of piano parts, a paper airplane that flew by being pushed along through the air with a piece of cardboard, and many people riding around on various configurations of bicycles. Oh, and the world's most confused concessions-stand employee.

This is just the smallest cross-section. If you are in the area, go! I think our summer is going to involve a lot of Fabri-Tak, photovoltaic cells, Legos, and found objects. Just a feeling.