Detroit’s creative community is mind-blowing, dedicated, and full of city pride. Last year, I remember seeing a T-shirt that summed it up: “Detroit Hustles Harder.” One of Detroit’s notable makers is Bethany Shorb of Cyberoptix Tie Lab, creator of some of the most original ties on the planet. Bethany will be exhibiting at this year’s Maker Faire Detroit, taking place this weekend, July 30 and 31, at The Henry Ford in Dearborn. 1. Tell us about Cyberoptix Tie Lab: what inspired you to make ties and how did you get started?
The Tie Lab division came about very organically. One afternoon I was experimenting with making a printed jacket for my fiancé. I had a silkscreen prepared with a huge graphic already sized for a larger garment. In fears of ruining the jacket, I practiced first on a few vintage, World War II-issue wool ties lying about the studio. (I’m a rabid comber of local antique and junk shops for photo and styling props.) I liked how they came out, edges truncated. I quickly photographed them and put them on Flickr, where I frequently archive and test market new work. The next day a few blogs picked up the images (including the MAKE blog!), and then a few more. And all the sudden I had people emailing me demanding to get one (or many more). Thankfully I’m adept at hand-coding, and I put up a quick site to purchase the ties by later that night. People always ask me why I “just make ties,” like it’s a bad word. Ties are always spoken of with such derision and sneer. They’re the perpetual punchline in songs and jokes, and consistently maligned as the most boring gift to give or receive. Think of Dad muttering, “Oh a tie. Thanks.” I wanted to change that. The necktie is such an interesting design problem; its shape gives the designer a challenging “canvas” to design on (dimension-wise, as it’s so long and thin, unlike a T-shirt). Conceptually, the tie is a traditionally hated object, one that symbolizes restraint, conformity, and is the symbol of corporate American drudgery. What fun and challenge is there in designing something that people already love? I enjoy subverting traditional tie patterns and motifs without venturing too much into gauche “novelty tie” territory. I have many clients who have jobs in the arts and want to wear something that is still artful, handmade, and well designed — but not stifling creatively. 2. How did you hear about Maker Faire and why did you decide to participate?
I’ve read MAKE magazine for years and always hoped that one of the events would come to Detroit. As much as I love to travel, I unfortunately have very limited time to do so, as running a busy studio demands all my time. We’re so fortunate now to have one right here. Having a Maker Faire local to Detroit is a wonderful catalyst to excite both the very young and bring more experienced adult makers together. We have a city and surrounding area abundant with with tinkerers, artists, crafters, and engineers from a very strong technical and conceptual skill set. It’s a really special time to be able to share what we do with others. 3. Describe to us the technique you’ll be demonstrating at the Faire.
In addition to selling finished men’s accessories, I’ll be demonstrating an environmentally responsible method of screenprinting that should be easy to understand and does not require a large investment to set up in one’s home or studio. This process is applicable to printing on a variety of surfaces, including fabric, metal, and wood. For some reason, there is a mystique and perceived level of extreme difficulty surrounding the screenprinting trade. I’m hoping to show some folks that it doesn’t have to be so hard! A few weeks ago I acquired a literal truckload of vintage circuit board and electronics schematic silkscreens. I’m super excited to debut these new, limited edition designs at Maker Faire. 
4. Tell us about yourself. How did you get started making things and who are your inspirations?
I’ve always made things since being a wee kid and knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life at a very early age. I have fond memories of developing film with my Dad in our basement darkroom — that was pretty exciting work for a six-year-old! I received my MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art ten years ago and currently split my time between exhibiting fine art internationally and running the men’s accessories line, Cyberoptix. We operate one of the largest sustainable, water-based, solvent-free print shops in the country right in Downtown Detroit’s Eastern Market — providing a seditious, punky fashion statement for executives bound to the neck noose, and a sharply styled alternative for those who don’t need to wear a tie, but choose to do so. All ties and scarves are designed and printed in-house. To date, I’ve hand-printed close to 50,000 neckties without the assistance of any machinery or automation. In addition to our stand-alone web shop and Etsy store, we’re fortunate to have grown the business, providing neckties to over 250 independent boutiques and museum shops. I was lucky to see the exhibition, “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” in New York last month. As I’ve always found his work a great inspiration, his recent, premature passing was devastating. A few of his quotes are daily meditations: “You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.” “I want to empower women. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.” 5. What new idea (in or outside of your field) has excited you most recently?
I’m still really excited about the internet circa 1995 when it evolved to having pictures and a shopping cart. The fact that one can base his or her operation in a city that may not have the population density needed to support a niche business but still have the ability to easily take in and ship orders around the world the next day is pretty amazing, Jetson’s kind of stuff to me. Still waiting for that flying car though. 6. What is your motto?
“Ties That Don’t Suck!” 
7. What advice would you give to the young makers out there just getting started?
Don’t get distracted or be lazy. If you really believe in your idea, you’ll probably have to put aside a few things you enjoy in order to get your idea or business off the ground, but it will be more than worth it in the end! You can sleep or socialize later. Chances are someone has the same or similar idea, and it’s up to you alone to make it happen first and best. While your peers can be an important source of support, look to the masters in your field for inspiration, not just your classmates who may be working with better proficiency. Look to the Eameses, the McQueens. and Van deer Rohes of the world, not little Johnny sitting next to you who got an A. 8. What do you love most about Detroit?
The comparatively low cost of operation allows artists an intense freedom to explore ideas that might not be possible elsewhere, and with resultant success attained far earlier in one’s career. We have both time and resources to dedicate to our craft that one might not be able to in New York or L.A. while paying $3000 a month in rent alone. People here are very resourceful and self-sufficient — the whiners and coat-tail riders are weeded out fast — self-starting and follow-through is a must here. Thanks Bethany! For all the information you need to attend this weekend’s extravaganza, visit the Maker Faire Detroit website. More:
Detroit is the freedom to make things… by Bethany Shorb  Maker Faire Daily is our online fast-news feed during Maker Faire. This weekend in Detroit, stafffmembers and makers will be posting images, thoughts, and video snapshots from the grounds of the Henry Ford Museum. Here are some tidbits from the lead up.
So why not bookmark the page, subscribe to the RSS feed, or via email to get a remote peek at the event, the makers, and their inspiring projects. Every night starting next Friday, I’ll be recapping the day’s events here on makezine.com.  Continuing the tradition from last year, OmniCorpDetroit is hosting the official Maker Faire Detroit kick-off party this Friday night, and i3Detroit is hosting the official afterparty Saturday evening. If last year was any indication, both will be a fantastic time. involving great people, great music, and inspiring projects and workspaces. [And lots of adult beverages.] -Michael Doyle
Note: This poster is color adjusted for stereo anaglyph cancellation. If you view it through red/cyan 3D glasses, one eye will only show info for the OCD party, while the other eye, only the i3 info.  Brandon Richards, in Eastern Market, testing the soundsystem on one of OCD’s heavily modified Power Wheel entries for Maker Faire Detroit. -Michael Doyle
 We stopped by the famous Heidelberg Project today. It is the life’s work of Tyree Guyton. His art transforms a city block into an inspirational space, and people like us come from all over to see it. -Dale Dougherty
 Tents are going up. The Life Size Mouse Trap is starting to take shape. Our team is on the ground. This “hack” wagon is ready for loading and unloading. -Dale Dougherty
In MAKE Volume 24, Jon Kalish wrote about Brooklyn’s unique Bamboo Bike Studio. In this follow-up piece, he looks at what the group has been up to since. You may already know Jon from his coverage of the DIY beat for NPR. We’re happy to welcome him to MAKE as a new online contributor. –Gareth  Piper Alldredge, manager of the Brooklyn studio
The Brooklyn-based Bamboo Bike Studio (BBS), where DIYers make their own bike frame out of bamboo in a two-day workshop, is opening satellite studios and branching out into the assembly of steel frame bikes. A bike building studio was opened in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district in November by BBS co-founder Sean Murray. A total of 42 bamboo bikes have been made there since it opened. (A total of at least 400 bamboo bikes have been made since the organization was founded.) The studio is now run by BBS co-founder Justin Aguinaldo, who is described on the BBS website as a former champion bike messenger. Located at 982 Post Street, the San Francisco studio offers bamboo builds twice a month. And like the mothership back in Red Hook, Brooklyn, it is now offering a workshop where participants either bring in a steel bike frame or purchase an inexpensive one and then proceed to install all the components, including wheels, pedals, handle bars and brakes.  Justin Aguinaldo, manager of the S.F. studio, seen here harvesting bamboo in New Jersey
"This is for somebody who wants the ability and the knowledge to be able to maintain their bicycle independently," Aguinaldo told MAKE. Adds BBS co-founder Marty Odlin: "It will be a DIY thing. We’re not building these bikes for people."
 Joints attached to the head tube after they’ve been wrapped with carbon fiber soaked in epoxy. Joints will be filed smooth before bike is finished.
Cyclists can assemble a steel bike with a coaster brake wheel set for as little as $400. The studio is aiming for a fee of less than $600 for a single speed bike with caliper brakes. Once you assemble your steel bike at the studio in San Francisco, you’re entitled to lifetime access to tools and a workstation there to maintain your bike free of charge.  Bike builder Sari Harris assesses her frame, which is attached to a custom-made aluminum jig.
The decision to branch out into steel frame bikes, oddly enough, was made in response to the assertion that the bamboo bikes were not totally green because they can’t be recycled. The epoxy used on the carbon fiber joints on BBS’s bamboo bikes isn’t recyclable. "We thought that was a valid criticism," says Odlin. But the studio is testing bikes made with a bio-degradable epoxy and Odlin hopes that eventually bamboo bikes will be totally recyclable. "We just love making bikes with people," says Odlin, 29, an Ivy League trained engineer and former competitive skier. "Any way for people to come in, hang out, build up their bike and be part of the whole thing, we’re open to." Odlin designed and built a powder coater for painting steel bike frames. Typically powder coaters cost $30,000, but the BBS version was built for a fraction of that and has a substantially smaller footprint. "We’re hoping that we can sell these to bike shops across the country," he says. It would be for $8,000. There is a patent pending for the BBS powder coater, which is made of structural tubing. Bike builders at the BBS studios in New York and San Francisco will pay for the powder coater by the hour. Odlin estimates it will cost $120 to powder coat a bike, though makers who assemble a steel bike at the studio can leave their frame bare, an option Odlin expects many to choose. In addition to a paint job, bike builders can create a custom head badge for their bike’s head tube, either out of metal or cloth. Odlin, who grew up in Maine, has a lobster on his head tube. Piper Alldredge, the manager of the Brooklyn studio, soaked a cotton patch with an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe embroidered on it with the resin used on the bamboo bike’s joints and attached it to her tube. Earlier this year, three members of the Brooklyn BBS team traveled to Kumasi, Ghana to set up a bamboo bike factory there. The makings of the factory were shipped in a container packed at the Red Hook HQ in September. Odlin, Aguinaldo, and a colleague, Ben Masters, spent two weeks in Ghana in January. The factory is being run as a profit-making enterprise and has about a dozen employees. The exporting of bamboo bike-making technology was made possible by the Millennium Cities Initiative, a project of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. It is hoped that the Kumasi facility will be the first large-scale bamboo bike factory in the world, capable of producing as many as 20,000 bikes a year. The bicycles are intended for Ghana’s rural poor. An initial order of 750 bikes are earmarked for Non-Governmental Organizations in Ghana.  Odlin (in gray T-shirt) and Aguinaldo (in blue T) with Ghanaian bike factory trainees. Standing between two frames (in gray shirt) is BBS staffer Fence Heanue.
In the coming months. bamboo bike studios will open in Alabama and Canada. Bike mechanic Zef Kraiker reports the studio he is opening in the Kensington Market section of Toronto should be operational by the end of August. In rural Greensboro, Alabama a bamboo bike building studio, run under the auspices of a group called Alabamboo, will commence with builds in September. The workshops will take place at a renovated historic storefront in downtown Greensboro, according to Pam Dorr, executive director of HERO, a community development agency in town. Alabamboo is the name that Dorr and her allies came up with to promote bamboo grown as a sustainable agricultural crop in Alabama. Among the bamboo boosters is the former first lady of Alabama, Marsha Folsom. Dorr says there’s enough golden bamboo on the roadsides in Hale County, where Greensboro is located, to build a couple hundred bikes a year. The Bamboo Bike Studio has been discovered by corporate advertisers, too. Color photographs of the BBS crew wearing Cole Haan footwear as they rode bamboo bikes around their Brooklyn workspace were featured in a company brochure. More recently, Odlin is featured in a television commercial for the HTC Sensation phone. As Odlin appears on screen an announcer intones, "You are the next breath of fresh air." Odlin estimates that so far more than 400 bikes made at the Bamboo Bike Studio are on the road. While most of them are the single speed model, which cost $932, are custom-fit and take two 12-hour days to build, it is now possible to spend just $700 to make a bamboo bike with a coaster brake. These come in small, medium, and large. Bike builders can also put on a rear bamboo rack for another $150. And now mountain bikes and road bikes with 7, 10, 14 and 20-speeds — including internal cables — can be built at BBS. For those who can’t make it to the Brooklyn, San Francisco, Toronto, or Alabama bike-making workshops, Odlin and his colleagues may be bringing the bike building to a city near you. On August 24th BBS’ “Celebration of American Bike Making Tour” kicks off in Rockport, Maine. Over the course of the next eight months, its mobile bike-building workshop in a truck will visit bicycle friendly cities from coast to coast. The truck will have gear to teach bamboo bike fabrication, as well as a mobile powder coater for steel bikes.
 From the Pages of MAKE: Volume 24: DIY Space Put your own satellite in orbit, launch a stratosphere balloon probe, and analyze galaxies for $20 with an easy spectrograph! We talk to the rocket mavericks reinventing the space industry, and renegade NASA hackers making smartphone robots and Lego satellites. This, plus a full payload of other cool DIY projects, from a helium-balloon camera that’s better than Google Earth, to an electromagnetic levitator that shoots aluminum rings, and much more. MAKE Volume 24, on sale now. BUY or SUBSCRIBE 
One of my favorite hackerspace projects is the insanely cool and utterly ambitious White Star project which aims to float a weather balloon from the U.S. to Europe across the Atlantic Jet Stream. And they’re showing off their ‘leetness at Maker Faire Detroit! Take it to Detroit! LVL1 Hackerspace's White Star Balloon team is going to be showing off the SpeedBall balloon system at MakerFaire Detroit, July 30 & 31 at The Henry Ford museum. We're super excited to be a part of this great exhibition of doers and makers! We'll have the full SpeedBall-1 Trans-Atlantic robot payload (and possibly the balloon) on static display for you to get an up-close peek at what it takes to make a 3-day airship tick. SpeedBall-2 is slated to make its public flight debut at the MakerFaire as a lean-mean indoor flying machine. It'll be stripped down to the bare necessities required to control it's altitude – arguably the most important innovation of the whole program. Consisting of the classic SNOX Ballast bottle, the Flight Computer, the Comm Controller, and the Ballast Controller, the load frame and a small 12v pack of AA batteries, SB-2 will hang from a small custom plastic balloon. Guided by a vertical cable to keep it from wandering around the museum, SB-2's balloon it will have a calibrated leak, causing it to slowly sink down, a high-speed simulation of helium loss over a 3-day air voyage. This will allow you to see the prowess of the ballast system and control algorithm, as it manages ascents, descents, and altitude holds, fully autonomously – look ma, no wires!
 
If you’re in Portland, OR for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, come to the expo floor and check out the Maker Shed. We’ve got a whole bunch of stuff for sale here; Arduinos, Mintduinos, Mintronics Survival Packs, Netduinos, books, and more. And we’ve got a couple of items that are out of stock in the online Maker Shed at the moment: The Redpark Serial Cable for iOS The Redpark Serial Cable for iOS is the first and only cable approved by Apple for connecting your iOS device to almost anything using serial communication! With this cable, you can open up your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and let your imagination run wild! Use external sensors in your iOS apps! Talk to an Arduino with your iPhone! The possibilities are unlimited!
and the new ADK Sensor Kit (it’s $359, but it includes huge selection of sensors, an Arduino Mega ADK, and sensor shield for plugging in all those sensors): Mega Sensor Shield V.2 x1 Button Module x2 LDR Module x1 Tilt Module x1 Therm Module x1 Accelerometer Module x1 Hall Sensor x1 Rotary Potentiometer Module x1 Linear Potentiometer Module x1 Touch Sensor Module x2 Joystick Sensor Module x2 Relay Module x2 Mosfet Module x1 Several LED modules Several Cables Arduino Mega ADK x 1
We’ll be open when the expo hall is open, and if you’re in Portland but not at OSCON, you can get a free expo hall pass right here! 
Christina McFall over on CRAFT has a great tutorial on using the cyanotype printing technique on textiles like handknits and crochet. Cyanotype is a fun printmaking technique that is well-suited for printing designs on hand knits and crochet as well as other fabric. While the nature of cyanotype limits the print to shades of blue*, the deep indigo blue is beautiful printed on different colors of yarn and fabric. The process is inexpensive, simple to get started, and relatively low-toxic, making it a great printing method for crafters and artists alike. Most people are familiar with cyanotype without knowing it – in the form of the blue sunprint papers for kids. However, instead of buying pre-treated paper, you can buy the cyanotype sensitizer and use it to treat just about anything. The cyanotype image is formed when fabric that has been coated with the sensitizing solution is exposed to UV light (sunlight). Where the light penetrates to the sensitized surface, a dark blue permanent dye is formed, and where the light is blocked, the fabric stays its original color. So with the use of a negative (like an old black and white photographic negative), you can print any image or artwork. Fortunately, it’s easy to make digital negatives with a computer and inkjet printer. In this tutorial, I will show you everything you need to know to get started making your own cyanotype prints on hand knits. The process is essentially the same for any other type of fabric or paper, so experiment and have fun. More: 
Meet the Makers: Christina McFall 
Circuit boards got you down? Why not add some flexibility to your projects with the LED Sewing Kit from the Maker Shed? This simple and fun kit includes everything you need to get started in soft electronics. Add some luminescence to your cross stitch or headlights to your hoodie! Need more inspiration? Check out Make: Projects or follow the instructions in Becky Stern’s article from CRAFT Volume 09.
Features:
(1) Sewable battery holder
(1) CR2032 coin cell battery
(7) Feet of conductive thread (enough for one or two projects)
(2) 5mm LEDs
(1) Metal snap for creating a switch
Electronic Embroidery 
I love this work by artist Jesse Houlding: The Magnet Drawing Machines are kinetic sculptures in which a series of magnets draws a circle on a sheet of paper with iron filings. The iron filings make different marks based on the strength of the magnetic field that holds them in place. As the magnets revolve, the friction from the paper causes the iron to collect in a tray at the base of the sculpture. The paper is periodically removed from the sculpture and labeled with the dates indicating the duration of the mark making. The sheet is then replaced. This work asks a question about what separates sculpture from other mediums. How does the piece function as both a sculpture, and as a sculpture that produces a drawing? What does that drawing represent? Is it a part of the sculpture after it is removed from the 'apparatus’, or does it exist in its own right, separate from the process that created it. I am interested in the accumulation of marks, of how time is evidenced in a work and the relationship between process and end-result.
[Via Ponoko] | |
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