makebright | making stuff in waterloo

Laurier Library LIFT Launch

Posted on October 10, 2015 by dw

Alliteration win! And cultural win for us all as the Laurier Library backing on to Albert Street lights up some micro-gallery space amid the stacks in cooperation with the Robert Langen Art Gallery: the LIFT Series. This is said to be a first step in finding a more permanent home for the Langen Gallery within the library and based on what I saw this is going to be a great fusion. Curator Suzanne Luke brought library chief Gohar Ashoughian and crew down to Maker Expo a few weeks ago to see what we were up to. I was glad to get up to their LIFT gig on Thursday last week.

I’ve got more story below, but want to take a quick second and give a shout out to my supporters who help make makebright stories possible. My first week on Patreon and here’s who stepped up to be awesome: Brent Wettlaufer, Vince Marcovecchio, Dinah Davis, Daryl Dore, and Cam Turner. I’ve been cranking out free work for six years here. If you’ve found something of value, something interesting here, please consider supporting my community-building mission with your pocket change. You’ll be investing in your community. Now more story and a completely unreasonable number of photos…

Miss K, aka Kristen Moss, talked about her sixth floor piece Out of the Cannon (above x 2).

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Posted in art, patron-supported | Tagged graffiti, Laurier, library, waterloo | Comments Off

Geometry of DTK yesterday

Posted on October 9, 2015 by dw

Circle.

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Posted in photography | Tagged King Street, Kitchener | Comments Off

1shot #247-some days all you see is the fence…

Posted on October 9, 2015 by dw

Heading for coffee with Cathy Farwell last week, I spotted these chairs and pots looking like a domestic echo of chrome and vinyl from my childhood.

On Dupont, this is Waterloo.

Posted in photography | Tagged 1shot, fence, waterloo | Comments Off

1shot #246-rare drugs

Posted on October 6, 2015 by dw

Friday on Spadina, I looked up.

This is Toronto.

Posted in photography | Tagged street, toronto | Comments Off

Seth says: do the work you want to do

Posted on October 5, 2015 by dw

My good friend Jon Johnson of Bearface Design organized a Monday movie series at The Princess themed around design. Last week, he arranged to show the biographical documentary “Seth’s Dominion”. The eponymous Seth (above) is an extremely talented and thoughtful cartoonist who just happens to live in Guelph. Seth joined the crowd at The Original Princess to offer a few comments before the movie, and field a Q&A afterward. He also hung around for a long time afterward to sign books and chat.

Before I go on: there is now a way you can financially support makebright. I set up an account on Patreon to accept small contributions starting at $1 (which is $1.31 Canadian) per non-trivial blog post like this one. Click right here to open a tab to the makebright Patreon page and watch my mildly amusing video. If you want to chip in to help me continue building community through independent storytelling, you’ll need to create an account there. It’s pretty easy. Thanks for being awesome. Now back to the story.

Seth made a comment that it’s important to do the work that you want to do. The work that is important to you regardless of how it is evaluated by the world. I do that. A lot. In fact, that’s all the stories you see featured here on makebright. Sometimes self-doubt tries to creep in, subverting my momentum, particularly when story traffic is low. But I’m stubbornly resolved to keep telling these independent stories. The very practical challenge for me is how to derive some revenue for these stories because makebright is my sole income. In the past I’ve considered (briefly) ads or paid posts or a paywall. All of that doesn’t fit. In my ideal world, some well-heeled person would give me a bag of money for the year and say: Go! Keep finding and shooting and telling those stories that you love.

As I left the theatre, an acquaintance Jeremy Ladan said to me “I love your work. I wish you had a Patreon account so I could give you a little money.” Patreon, for the uninitiated, is a mechanism to support somebody’s work with (typically) small recurring payments. So a creator might choose to accept set monthly contributions or a per-podcast/post/video amount from his supporters. The funny thing is I’ve had a Patreon account for six months; I just haven’t switched it on until today. I was concerned about signing on supporters and then not delivering the stories. The reality over the past six months is that I keep putting the stories out and I *love* doing these stories. In large part, it’s all I think about. As you’ve already read, that is all hooked up now. It’s an experiment. We’ll see how it goes. Soft launch. Thanks to Daryl, Lisa, and Calder for feedback on my Patreon campaign.

One more thing, it looks like the anticipated next movie “Drew” in Jon’s Art, Design & Architecture series got rescheduled to Nov 2.

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Posted in fieldtrip | Tagged art, Princess Cinema, waterloo | Comments Off

UTW bikes

Posted on October 4, 2015 by dw

Found this sweet bike Uptown Waterloo as Brohemus and I wandered the evening last week.

Update 2015-10-05: John Johnson noted that this bike belongs to Andy Cox, co-owner with his wife Lori of King Street Cycles, who told me: “Your pic is of the 1967 Norton I built over the last 3 years. Great pic!” and when I asked what he most loved about it he said: “The thing I love most about that bike is that it’s finally finished, LOL! Really though, I’m pretty proud of the seat/tail section; was told many times by many people more experienced than myself that it “couldn’t be done”, and yet there it is. Also, pretty happy how the pipes turned out. I find building a bike often feels like an exercise of compromise, in that the vision in my head has to be slightly compromised to actually exist and function in the “real world”, and that tail section and those pipes are the closest I have come to representing what was in my mind’s eye.”

We are all makers.

Alas, Andy’s Norton was not part of the BIKE SALE.

At King and Erb, this is Waterloo.

Posted in photography | Tagged bicycle, King Street, motorcycle, waterloo | Comments Off

Kitchener: can we keep this set at City Hall?

Posted on September 29, 2015 by dw

Further on my sandwich search today, I popped by City Hall to peek in at Lauren Weinberg’s new place there in the old Carbon Computing space. Well, I got more than I bargained for. I was trying to figure out why there was this funky plywood structure going up around the stage and what the deal was with the giant wind machines parked out front.

Well, who should happen by but Cat Bischoff who filled me in that this is a set build for the TV series Heroes, which is apparently doing a bit of filming here. My only question now is: can we keep it?

More pics…

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Posted in build | Tagged construction, KCH, Kitchener | Comments Off

Surveying the music landscape

Posted on September 29, 2015 by dw

Navigating the construction chaos at the corner of Charles and Francis in Downtown Kitchener, on my wander to get a sandwich today, I saw a very familiar sticker.

Your surveyor knows about The Jazz Room. Do you?

Didn’t know I loved jazz until Preece & Nagy and Co. turned me on to it. Right in Uptown Waterloo in the Heuther. Regular readers may recall when the music stage was built in the former strip bar, and when the grand piano was rebuilt, and when the doors opened with the most wicked music back in 2011.

Check out the lineup of acts at kwjazzroom.com and then just go. A heads-up: they’re serious about the music, so you’ll be shushed if you’re talking during the sets. This is a great place to spend the winter.

In Kitchener, this is Waterloo.

Posted in pure fun | Tagged The Jazz Room | Comments Off

Hack The North 2015–in brief… sort of

Posted on September 28, 2015 by dw

I was jammed with Maker Expo organization this year so I wasn’t available to cover Hack The North in depth. Still I was happy to hear Kartik confirm that I was on the guest list. It’s a pretty damned cool event only a couple of clicks down the road from my house. So after wrapping up Maker Expo Saturday evening, I woke up late Sunday morning, jammed a pot of coffee, and set out for Engineering 5 at The University of Waterloo for the closing ceremony.

This hacker above came up on stage from an impromptu call by Val for anyone with special talents they were willing to show off. This, my friends, is what opera singing looks like at a hackathon. Not. Even. Kidding. It was the most beautiful sound and it sent chills down my back and transported the entire audience of hundreds of exhausted hackers to a higher plane. No mic required. Her voice just filled that room and you could hear a pin drop. Bravo.

E5, temporary home of HTN again this year. For last year’s HTN here, Communitech hired me to cover the event end to end. I was flattered to hear from the HTN crew that they refer everyone who wants to know about their event to that post I did.

Click through for an unreasonable number of photos and very few words…

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Posted in event | Tagged hack, UW, waterloo | Comments Off

More local makers-Etsy Made in Canada WR v2.0

Posted on September 27, 2015 by dw

Chalk up another makerly weekend in Waterloo Region! After a breakfast meeting with my pal Stephen Preece at Mel’s, I said hey I’m going to this thing called Etsy: Made in Canada. I shot it last year when it was at the Walper. You should come with me and see the power of the micro-economy. So away we went.

Before I get into the story along with an unreasonable number of photos, let me say that this right here is my business. Just like all the makers featured here who attempt to make a profitable business out of candles and crocheting, I’m trying to make a business out of storytelling. If I had been hired to do this job, I would have quoted $700+HST. That would include the travel, the shoot, the post-processing, the story, and the linking. Been doing this for 6 years now and one variant of my product looks exactly like this post. Please consider hiring me. Ok, on with the story.

Above, is marker Maria Walcott of Nerdifacts who crochets these awesome cuffs, here she models the Wonder Woman edition. Check out her Etsy store here.

Picking up on the dream I pitched to 120 Laurier entrepreneurship students a couple weeks ago, to increase the Region’s collective creative capacity, and fueled by an unwise amount of coffee, I turned the discussion to micro-economies. This Etsy event seemed like a great place to start looking at how makers can make their stuff and then also make money. It is interesting to think about why an online marketplace like Etsy would support a second meet-up-in-real-life market of Etsy makers in dozens of regions across Canada. New readers may be inclined to ask two questions: Q1. Who are these makers among us who sell stuff? Q2. Is anyone in Waterloo Region interested in purchasing unique merch from local makers?

I’ll get to the first question in the course of this post, covering a small subset of the 65 Etsy makers who were in this show. On the second question, check out the queue of people patiently lined up out of the parking lot, down the laneway all the way to Weber Street. Emanuel Village, the venue, is like most venues capped for occupancy due to fire regulations. I thought I heard 250 were allowed inside at any given time, which left a lot of eager shoppers in line for a bit. It also really shows the demand within the Region.

More…

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Posted in fieldtrip | Tagged makers | 3 Comments