Hey kwartzlab makers!
I’ve decided to redirect my kwartzlab energy toward my new venture: makebright.com Been working on this for about 4 months now, contributing to the make-o-sphere under this new banner and starting to get some traction, which explains my absence from the lab. At the end of the month, I’ll turn in my access card (lucky #4), for some new member to pick up, and withdraw from kwartzlab.
Can you believe it’s been almost 2 years(!!!) since we were meeting up in an empty classroom in the Math and Computers building at UW on Thursday nights? Meeting as total strangers. Defining our vision for the then-unnamed group we were building. Surveying potential members. Wrangling the naysayers. Building a community from scratch with few resources. Learning from established maker spaces. Figuring out commercial leasing, incorporation, group insurance, financial models. Slapping down those first hundred dollar cheques for seed money. Speaking to city councils. Demo’ing projects at various events. Spreading the word. Running workshops from our garages and community rooms. Finding a place we could afford. Gutting our space of 20 truckloads of junk. Drywalling, sanding, painting, glazing, plumbing, and rewiring. Opening our doors to the public for the first time, and then every Tuesday Open Night since then. What a great adventure!
I’ve visited maker spaces in London, Toronto, San Francisco, and Washington DC, and I’m very proud of what we’ve built here in KW. kwartzlab has a unique vibe, and I’m really looking forward to continued collaboration with kwartzlabbers as I invent makebright.
Happy making,
DW