Browsing “DiYVR”

DiYVR is a weekly spotlight on all things handmade, done-by-oneself, crafted and hacked around Vancouver, featuring profiles of makers, event announcements, exhibits and general DIY fun. Know someone or something we should cover? Email me!And don’t forget to roll up your sleeves and join us in our first citywide home-improvement challenge!

East Van homeowners LL and Cool J bought their 80-year-old house a couple years ago, and their total inexperience with renovations didn’t seem to matter to them when they decided off the bat to reno the house. Like, the whole house.

Digicam in hand, they’ve been documenting their work, project by project. Season 3 of their web show Lez Renovate – “Watch as hilarity and humility ensue as two East Vancouver lesbians grapple with the real time renovation of an 80 year old house, with no handyman in sight” – launches on After Ellen this week. I caught up with LL by email about their DIY adventures. …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

DiYVR is a weekly spotlight on all things handmade, done-by-oneself, crafted and hacked around Vancouver, featuring profiles of makers, event announcements, exhibits and general DIY fun. Know someone or something we should cover? Email me!

When we picked our son up at the hospital the day we adopted him, we were inundated with information. Along with being shown how to bathe, feed, diaper and generally handle a newborn, we were given all manner of printed materials, including a DVD about purple crying.

Turned out our kid is one of the chillest babies we know – a quality we never take for granted. But it was still good to have the information about that period of inconsolable crying some babies experience – crying so hard that the baby’s face turns purple. It’s the kind of crying that sometimes leads exhausted parents to shake their baby, which is why there’s a campaign to raise awareness about the fact that the crying is not abnormal, that parents who feel helpless against it are not alone, and that there are things you can do as a parent to handle the stress of an inconsolable infant.

And now there’s a North America-wide crafts campaign called Click for Babies to further raise awareness and put an end to shaken baby syndrome. The goal is to collect enough handmade purple hats that every baby born in November in participating hospitals will receive one.

Participating is as simple as making a hat in a newborn size in super-soft, machine-washable purple yarn, and sending or dropping it off by 26th October, 2011. Click for Babies has more info about newborn head sizes, hat specs, etc.

Vancouver Drop-off Locations

Gina Brown’s Yarn
3424 West Broadway
604-734-4840

Three Bags Full
4458 Main Street
604-874-9665

Send-in Address

ATTN: Claire Yambao, Provincial Program Coordinator
Prevent Shaken Baby Syndrome BC
BC Children’s Hospital
4480 Oak Street, Room K1-201
Vancouver, BC V6H 3V4

DiYVR is a weekly spotlight on all things handmade, done-by-oneself, crafted and hacked around Vancouver, featuring profiles of makers, event announcements, exhibits and general DIY fun. Know someone or something we should cover? Email me!

Farm-to-Table Vancouver, by Shinsuke Ikegame on Flickr (CC-by-nc licensed)

For all the talk of making and doing-oneself, there’s an awful lot of nothing said about cooking. Nay, cooking seems to occupy a niche all its own. That’s all well and good, but just because we eat the results doesn’t take away from the fact that when we take two ingredients and combine them to make something new, we’re totally DIYing.

As a maker of an admittedly less practical sort, I’m intimately familiar with the doing involved with cooking. Mostly because I’ve avoided cooking pretty much forever. Unless it’s waffles or cookies, I consider cooking to be about as enjoyable as getting my right foot run over by a tractor.

But this summer my kid started eating “solid” food – conveniently timed with the start of farmer’s market season. And you know what? I love pureeing food for him. Sure, this is the most basic of basic cooking, but I’m actually learning how foods are prepared. So far I’ve transformed farmer’s market bounty into weeks’ worth of food for the baby, and in the process I’ve started eating better, myself. (Some verdicts: He loves blueberries and he’s pretty keen on carrots. Not so much with the broccoli, zucchini and apricots – which just makes my challenge all the more satisfying.)

Inspired by my own adventures in “cooking”, I asked Vancouver, via Twitter and Google+, what you all are cooking this summer. Some fab recipes came through. Check it out: …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

DiYVR is a weekly spotlight on all things handmade, done-by-oneself, crafted and hacked around Vancouver, featuring profiles of makers, event announcements, exhibits and general do-it-yourself fun. Know someone or something we should cover? Email me!

Saturday, July 30th is the 22nd annual Illuminares Lantern Festival. It’s sure to be one of the most magical evenings you’ll spend in a summer filled with festivals, and it’s also an opportunity to get your creative DIY on.

The event is put on by the Public Dreams organization, and I caught up with Managing Director Laura Grieco for a wee, five-question interview. …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

DiYVR is a weekly spotlight on all things handmade, done-by-oneself, crafted and hacked around Vancouver, featuring profiles of makers, event announcements, exhibits and general DIY fun. Know someone or something we should cover? Email me!

“Making creates evidence of learning.” Dale Dougherty, founder of Maker Faire and MAKE Magazine, is passionate about experiential learning, and he’s just as passionate about making stuff simply for the pure joy of it.

Saturday night, Dale delivered the keynote at the Tech Cocktail event as part of the 2011 WorldFuture Conference. I can’t speak for the inventors in the audience, but I can say that, sitting with the organizers of the Vancouver Mini Maker Faire, we in the front row were riveted, and sometimes downright giddy.

If you’ve never picked up a copy of MAKE, see if you can find one. (I often find a pile at Book Warehouse.) In its pages you’ll find instructions for how to do things like build your own space-worthy satellite, rig a t-shirt with LED lights, or turn your grandparents’ gramophone into an iPod player. It doesn’t matter if you don’t actually want to do these things – it’s just exciting to know you can, and to bask in the excitement of people who have.

Showing photos and videos of Maker Faires and maker-run events from his homebase in the San Francisco Bay area, Dale touched on theories of experiential learning in developmental psychology, qualities makers tend to share (an inclination not to follow rules, a passion for trying new things, an eagerness to talk to other people about what they make), and the contagious excitement that comes from showing off even the most absurd of creations (muffin car, anyone?).

The Tech Cocktail event featured nifty homegrown apps and inventions like Contractually, a web-based app designed to make contract management fun (I know the founder, I can vouch for the fun part), and devices like the Golden-i headset computer (it’s more back to the future than futuristic, but it was really cool to try out).

Here’s Maker Faire featured on a recent episode of PBS News Hour, including a better overview of Dale’s thoughts on making and education than I could paraphrase here:

There’s a vast, worldwide community of makers, and I’m so excited that the Vancouver Maker Faire brought so many of us together for the first time, and that the World Future Society brought Dale Dougherty to town. If going to Maker Faire, or reading this post, is the first you’ve heard about the maker movement, check out any of the hacker spaces, craft shops or DIY events around town. If you have questions about how to get involved or even just dip your toe in the water, ask in the comments or drop me a line on Twitter.