 Toy Take Apart at the Exploratorium Tinkering Studio's Open MAKE Start 2012 by crossing your “Ts” with the Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio. Twenty Twelve begins with four tantalizing T-themes for the Tinkering Studio’s series of Open MAKE events. The first “T,” on Saturday, January 21, is Toys, and will include a visit from Lego sculptor Nathan Sawaya and other Featured Makers. The Toys theme will be followed by Tools (February 18), Time (March 17), and Trash (April 21).  © Nathan Sawaya - The Art of the Brick If you are a fan of Maker Faire, you won’t want to miss these tasty appetizers organized by our friends at the Exploratorium. Open MAKE runs from 10am to 2pm on the third Saturday of each month through April. Visitors are invited to explore their own creativity with makers from around the Bay Area, who will share their art, ingenuity, and techniques for making. In addition, Dale Dougherty, founder and editor of MAKE, will interview featured makers in the McBean Theater. This event is included in the price of the museum’s general admission and open to everyone. Participants in the Young Makers program and those who have registered Maker Clubs will receive instructions for entry by email. Make sure you’ve signed up with us if you are a Young Maker. Open MAKE is a collaboration between the Exploratorium, MAKE magazine, and Pixar Animation Studios.  
The robo-spiders have returned from their final 2011 traverse of the webway, the cogitators have done their last bit-crunching, and independent accounting droids have wax-sealed the final numbers. Let me kill a few seconds while I wait for one of these rust-buckets to trundle over here with the envelope… Astoundingly, seven of the 10 top posts were by Sean Ragan. That guy is serious click-bait. We’re also thrilled that two of the ten are original builds (again, by that Sean fellow) posted on Make: Projects. John Baichtal, our resident Lego guru and Lego book author, had the #4 spot with a Lego project, and I made it onto the big board with the “Tips My Dad Says” card that we created for Father’s Day. It may seem surprising to see Maker Shed on the list, with a Minty Boost product post, until you realize that this post busted out after the Tsunami/power plant meltdown, the east coast earthquake, and hurricane season. Suddenly, lots of people probably realized that their mobile phone was now their only phone, so when the power goes out, they need another way of keeping their phones charged. OK, the droid is handing me the envelope. (“Let go! Give it to me! You’re tearing it. [yank] Jeez. [kick] Get out of here, you smell like rancid brake fluid.”). Er-hurm… so, without further ado, here are the top ten most popular posts on Makezine for 2011. #10 
Giant Machete-Shooting Slingshot
#09 
Make: Projects – Doortop Stash
#08 
Make: Projects – Pop Top Lamp Shade
#07 
Matryoshka knives
#06 
“Tips My Dad Says” Downloadable Card
#05 
In the Maker Shed: Minty Boost USB Charger
#04 
10,000-Brick Lego Sandcrawler
#03 
Altered thrift store art: Some personal faves
#02 
Mostly Carved Away Eggshell
#01 
A Tiny Toothpick Treehouse in a Bitty Broccoli Tree
This post, published on July 1st, 2011, was in a number bracket all by itself. Sean learned of the project on Maker Shed product developer Marc de Vinck’s nerdstink blog. The “treehouse” was created by artist, photographer, musician Brock Davis. Brock writes on Flickr that he couldn’t build a real treehouse for his son, so he make one in a broccoli bunch out of balsa instead. The moment this post went up, it generated insane traffic and has continued to do so ever since. In six months, it racked up some 1.6 million pageviews, 1.5 million stumbles, and countless social media reposts. Go, Bitty Broccoli Treehouse, GO!
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Other Best of MAKE 2011 covearge  
Happy New Year to all of you! We hope you had a fantastic 2011 and are looking forward to more inspiration, learning, collaboration, and making in 2012. We’ve got some exciting things planned for the site this year: Continuing with our site redesign, a new regular series of themed content packages, the continuation of our Skill Builder series (this year centered on materials), more site contributions from the hackerspace and mini Maker Faire communities — and from you, our readers, more maker pro business coverage, more of Phil Torrone’s popular Soapbox columns, weekly Toolsdays, and much more. We’re also going to bring back Codebox, exploring programming languages for makers, and we’ll be delving deeper into Arduino/microcontrollers, embedded systems, robotics, and other technologies, for those who are now well-beyond getting started in those disciplines. And, of course, there will be four juicy issues of the print magazine, special print issues, more awesome Make: Videos, Make: Live, Make: Projects, Make: Kit Reviews, Maker Shed, and more MAKE-developed kits in the Shed. We also have some cool Make: Books-branded O’Reilly titles in the works for 2012. And then there are the greatest DIY shows on earth, Maker Faires and mini Maker Faires. Whoa, that’s a ton of stuff. We better get to work! As always, we’d love to hear what you’d like to see here on the MAKE site. Please leave your thoughts in the comments below. And again, Happy New Year!  More Recent Articles | |
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