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Makers Local has borrowed an etching press temporarily. It’s a simple but versatile model, and we’ll be teaching how to use it it Saturday, May 22 at 3pm. The class is very basic, and covers everything you’d need to know to ink up a relief block and operate a printing press. Interested folks won’t need to bring anything, we’ve got all the bases covered at the shop. If you want to make an original image, that’s great! If you don’t, that’s also great! There’s a rumor we might have some copper plate etching happening as well, but we’ll see.

The press is only in the shop for a limited time, and we’ll probably never get a machine like this again, so this could be your only chance to play with one. Don’t miss out!

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This Saturday, May 8 at 3PM Makers Local will have a class to teach the basics of silk screen printing. In just a few hours we’ll have screens ready to print single color images on paper, canvas or fabric. At the end of the class we’ll start hand printing our own tshirts with our Makers Local logo and other original graphics.

All you need to bring is a blank shirt and your own single color image. For example, our logo –

ML256 Logo
ML256 Logo
Screen Printing
Behold the final product!

Text is fine, any image file format will be okay. If you want help creating your own image, feel free to come by for this week’s Art Night, May 6 at 7 pm and we can make it happen.

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Next Thursday, January 28 at Makers Local I’ll be teaching a class on the basics of GIMP. It’s a very powerful tool for editing imagery and it’s free, which makes it ideal for enhancing photos or graphics work. For a one night class, I’m going to cover the most basic tools, and the most obvious applications for first-time users, like touching up photos or creating a simple graphic or text editing. Benalene is going to help by going over the basics of InkScape, another freeware application which that has good vector graphics tools.

If you’ve got photos you want to touch up with common issues (weird lighting, red-eye, etc) we’ll show easy ways to fix them. Also, if you want some quick ways to add a little polish to imagery for a website, business card, or other personal project, we’ll talk about the most common techniques.

You’ll probably want to bring your laptop or netbook with GIMP and InkScape already installed so you can play with the tools we’re talking about as we go.

The date is set for Thursday, January 28 2010 at 7pm.

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D&D 101

Hello Makers!  This upcoming Tuesday, January the 19th @6:30, we’re having a class at the Shop to teach people the basics of Dungeons and Dragons, a classic nerd past time.  Jeff Powers, an experienced Dungeon Master will giving a presenation and showing us what nerds used to do for fun before there were internet connections.  There will also be a small sample game for a little hands-on experience.  We’ll be using 4th edition rules (the most recent) but people don’t need to bring anything.  All materials are going to be provided.

I hope to see you there!

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This Friday, at 6 pm we’re going to brew our own carbonated sodas at the Make Shop.  It’s a surprisingly easy process, and shouldn’t take longer than an hour or two to make about a gallon.  If you’re interested, all you need to bring is a clean bottle and some ingredients.  There are specific recipes all over the internet, but I’ll be providing some basics from a recipe I found:

•white sugar

•brown sugar

•cinnamon

•maple syrup

•vanilla

•nutmeg

•honey

I hope I see you there.