Maker Faire 2025

Intro

I have such fond memories of running around Maker Faire as a teenager in 2015 - 19, and even exhibiting my own work in the last two years I went. I knew it had gotten a lot smaller since they re-opened after the pandemic (I also remember discussions, even before the shutdown, of the 2020 faire being severely scaled back due to sponsorship cuts) but it still felt like a wonderland to me. Being surrounded by people who love making stuff and the projects they make. From code to art to cardboard. It made kid me so excited to keep delving into all my different hobbies. It was also one of the first places that this weird little nerd felt comfortable talking to strangers, enthusiastic even, knowing we all had something in common and an easy conversation starter - what is your project? What do you like to make?

The maker movement as a whole, and the talks given by Adam Savage in line with the philosophy, are what made me who I am today. They're whatt gave my the permission to get involved with whatever I was excited about, and taught me to appreciate the world around me as objects and systems designed by people.

So all in all, it was very exiting to be back, and exhibiting with a project I love so much!

This year I would be helping run the booth for the puppet show (and so much more!): Fogtown. The team first went to Make Faire last year, but I was too busy with a new job at the time to take a full weekend off. I recommended the team go last year, knowing that the combination of art and technology in a professional - but still very approachable and user-friendly form - would be right up the alley of Maker Faire attendees. Most of the marketing focus had been on the series as a piece of media - the characters and stories took the forefront of discussion, but everyone wanted to know how the puppets worked! I suggested they focus on the techniques used as a talking point and a demonstration, and interest in the show itself would come from the footage shown and naturally progress from interest in the tech.

And I was right! They got kinda overwhelmed even, with only 2.5 people to run the booth they were swarmed. Hearing how busy they were last year with too small of a team, and knowing I had enough time to keep space in my schedule, I was determined to go in 2025. With 5 people on duty, we each had plenty of time to take breaks and experience the event for ourselves.

Fogtown is a Sherlock Holmes adaptation which combines small-scale virtual production with live action puppetry! All our sets are digitally sculpted in Blender, brought into Unreal for lighting and animations, and displayed on a monitor to use as a backdrop for the 8-inch rod puppets. It’s 95% in camera, our standard filming process uses no green screen or 3D animation. The exception is made for those specific 5% SFX shots that were beyond the limits of the setup, where both green screen and 3D animation are used. We have a finished pilot episode on YouTube and a demo of an FMV choose-your-own-adventure game which is filmed in the same way, both of which we are looking for support to expand.

That’s the pitch! I repeated it a lot over those three days.

Day 1 - travel day

Time to meet the team!

• Sean - showrunner, writer, the brains behind it all, led the team last year
• Kayla - film background, regularly seen on-set managing our lighting setup and puppeteering
• Jovah - film background, spent some time on set but we hadn’t met before, brought the nice camera
• Presley - spent one day on set doing one single shot and its one of the best, just as crazy about puppets as I am
• Me !

10 hours in the car... not much else to say! We left Portland at 1pm and arrived at the place we were staying at 11:30.

Day 2 - school day

September 26th. Friday at Maker Faire is always the school field trip day, there’s fewer events going on and not every booth is set up yet.

We got there around 9am with an hour to setup. Luckily, we don’t have anything too large. Unluckily, only 2 of our 5 person team knew the tech setup, and in a hurry to leave the day before our cords were less than organized. So, there was some holdback as we waited for instructions to get our monitors in place. But we had everything mostly set up by the gates opening at 10, and fully set up by the time people started wandering by our table 20 minutes later.

The booth across the way from us was StemFinity, startup bringing tech education to schools. We were also catty-corner from the Chomp Saw booth, which is a special table-saw like device that uses a hole punch to efficiently cut cardboard. It’s completely safe and really efficient - I got to use one on the bug project (not to just shill for them - it's genuinely cool). Unfortunately I can’t afford the 250 dollar asking price at the moment, but for how much I work with cardboard it’s definitely on my list if I ever run my own space with that kind of a budget.

Next to Chomp Saw was a local kid's maker space with a chicken robot that dispensed fortunes based on old automaton designs. Since we were so close, we were at each others' booths often, and I even made some Fogtown pins using their pin-making setup.

This day ended early - 3pm - so we went out to get pizza afterward and played board games back at the house. I lost Hive twice (it was close though) and won Bananagrams.

Day 3 - long day

Starting at 10 am again and ending at 5, Saturday is the first proper day of the Faire, and the busiest! Now that we had experience with the setup, we were able to plan our schedule to make sure each person got more time to tap out and explore. Unfortunately, Presley wasn't feeling great for the second half, so we missed out on some time looking around together.

We made a rat friend!

After another pretty standard day, the Make Mixer took place on one side of the event space. We packed up our booth, took our valuables back to the car, and made it back for the mixer starting around 6. They had a free nacho line which was pretty sweet, a free drink token for each exhibitor (mediocre options) and some music inside. We spent most of the time outside, though.

Some people we said hi to that evening:

• A cosplayer with a cool spinning wizard staff that used timed flashing LEDs to create an animated 3D zoetrope. They also said they recognized me from comiccons in Portland and remembered following me on Instragram - a fun surprise
• One of the guys running the motorized trains that were giving rides
• A couple people running the crash labs booth
• A father and son who have been making daleks and bringing them to Maker Faire for many years, I remember seeing them before!
• Guy with a cool spider bot, he had it dance to Pink Pony Club for us

Near the end of the night, we wandered over to the giant art car - which we had been calling the bug car - to have a turn onboard with all the lights and effects playing. As son as we sat down though, we noticed all the crew climbing on board - and soon we were moving! The bug car was heading back to its spot on the midway for the faire the next day. We got spirited away by the bug car! Waving to passersby from the second floor like a parade float.

Day 4 - final day

Sunday was once again 10-5, but with nothing planned for afterward. We had more down time, even a few moments with no one at our booth, and Presley and I took the opportunity to properly seek out all the areas we hadn't been in yet.

We waved to the dalek guy, which was very lovely to feel like there were lasting connections made beyond small talk. We talked to a woman helping her son run his booth about fringe theater and puppetry, a woman selling upcycled fabric was excited to talk about sewing outreach and efforts to minimize fabric waste, and we talked to many people about Fogtown as well. I was absolutely mesmerized by a booth with ooblek dancing around using the vibration from sets of speakers. It was like a little alien creature.

Back at where the Maker Mixer had been the night before, we got to properly experience the Spoon House in the daytime. The Spoon House is, as it sounds, a house made of curtains of linked spoons. It's filled with spoon furniture, spoon plants, and even spoon reading material.

I started talking to the woman who runs the booth - she was asking to see my patch-covered-coveralls I had worn for the occasion - and she asked if she knew me. I realized I recognized her too, and she told me st previous Maker Faires, she ran the Fly Your Freak Flag High booth, a project encouraging people to make a literal freak flag and display all their freaks proudly. Understandably, I spent AGES at this booth in 2017 AND 2019, making two flags, and chatting with the owner.

She asked if I was the one with the cardboard lizard, and I said yes! She said "you grew up and shit!" which made me feel just so seen and glad to be able to make this connection again. I will be emailing her and hopefully we can keep some contact!

While we walked by the stage on our way out of the dark room, we heard the singer shouting “who here identifies as trans or queer!” And of course we whooped loudly. That is something I was a little concerned / curious about Maker Faire this year - how queer friendly would it be? Generally, of course, these are progressive people, and I had seen plenty of your standard quirky weirdos in past years, but I didn't trust barely out kid me to be a good judge on whether a space felt truly comfortable.

I am happy to announce that it was queer-friendly as hell. I spotted plenty of alt youth and furries (where the furries are comfortable, the gays are comfortable, it’s a very strong litmus test) and any creative community project inevitably ended up covered in pride flags.

Some booths even had pride flags as part of their merch. (I also got some right to repair stickers with a trans pride skull on them, reminding me of Natalie’s right to repair trans body horror clown piece from last year’s Stage Fright) I'm very glad that, now that I'm old enough for it to matter to me, Maker Faire remains a place welcoming to not just surface level weirdos, but the queers and the trans' and the furries. I was a little anxious this year with my patch and pin choices, but next year I plan to be even more out and open.

At the end of the day we packed up, said goodbye to our neighbors, and got Mexican food before crashing at the house and playing a few more rounds of board games. I ended the night 5 for 5 at Bananagrams.

Day 5 - home again home again

A much more manageable 10 hour car ride this time, though the rain was intense. We left at 9am and made it home by 7:30pm.

Throughout the weekend, I got Sean and Jovah invested in Out for Blood - the podcast deep-dive into the Braodway musical flop by which all other flops are measured: Carrie. We got 7 1/2 hours into the over 10 hour series, I'm glad my choice of listening material was approved!

Outro

In conclusion, I'm incredibly glad I went this year. I'm a little sad it seems to be smaller than in previous years, but I'm looking forward to seeing it grow. I want very badly to exhibit my own puppets and projects in the future, I missed being an exhibit that could walk around and talk to people while seeing the faire. I think my Pepper's Ghosts would fit in perfectly if I could find a way to move the pieces down there.