The year marches on, and we are getting closer to holiday celebrations, while finishing up others. For those of you who celebrate Hanukkah, I hope that the festival was full of lights, peace, and remembering. For those of you who don’t, and want to know more, I heard it described in the most modern of terms. Imagine you are waiting for a life changing phone call, you have no charger, your phone is at 10% battery life, and it stays on for eight days and nights. That is Hanukkah.
This weekend we also had our Make Me a Holiday event. It was an open house full of things to make and do, like laser cutting ornaments, making mantra bracelets, sewing ornaments and stockings, watching Eddie on the forge making icicles and candy canes, creating LED Christmas trees, and enjoying homemade wassail and cookies. Everyone had a great time, and if you didn’t come, we hope to see you at our next event.
Speaking of next events, we have some fun ones coming up! Eddie likes working with his forge, so we have decided to create a monthly ‘forge day’, where we bring it in and fire it up, to make all sorts of fun with red-hot metal! On those days we may have some how-to classes and workshops as well! Stay tuned to get the details as we hammer them out. (See what I did there?)
We also happened into an interesting donation; Lots of graham crackers! Because we loved this weekend’s event, and we want to see more smiling faces, I have decided to make an event out of our largess of graham crakers, and this weekend (Saturday, December 15th), from 1pm to 5pm we will be having a free gingerbread(ish) house decorating party at the Fab Lab. All ages are welcome! We will provide the decorating supplies, free cookies, hot cocoa, and wassail. We will also have another chance for you to get some fun kits, decorations, and custom presents for the holidays for those who are not done shopping. Come on down and join us.
One other piece of news, which you get to hear before anyone else, my dear readers, is that we are rebranding soon. We will be switching our name to the Iowa City Fab Lab, and leaving STEAM behind. There are various reasons for this, but the long and short is that we are open and available to everyone, and we wanted to reflect it in who we are for. STEAM has been used so much by the educational system it has become a buzz-word for children’s programming. We want everyone to know that we are for them, not just for the school-aged crowd.
We have a few classes we have added, including a throw-pillow course, kumihimo beaded necklaces, and lasercut ornaments and decorations. If you have ever wanted to try your hand at making jewelry, sewing, or shooting coherent light at things, we have you covered!
I hope to see you all this weekend at our event, and I will talk to you all soon.
Kirk