This year’s Lambeth Open takes place on 1 and 2 October. If you are an artist or craftsperson and would like to open your studio or workspace to visitors as well as selling your pieces, you need to register soon.
The publicity leaflets are being printed at the beginning of August, so if you would like your details to appear on these as well as on the website, you will need to create an account at www.lambethopen.com and upload your details and pictures. Admission is completely free.
To celebrate the successful soft launch of Makerhood Brixton last week, more than a dozen members of the Makerhood team, makers and their friends gathered for a picnic in Brockwell Park. Unlike last weekend (and most of the summer so far), the weather was kind – an emergency supply of sunscreen had to be delivered!
After the drinking and eating (including delicious cupcakes from Carly of Picakes), the spirit of competition reared its head during the Viking game. The rules are too complicated to explain here (or even there), but it involves two teams throwing wooden sticks at wooden blocks.
A good time was had by all, though as the game went on (and on) we started to see why the Vikings decided to move on to pillaging and looting for a change of scene… 🙂
If you couldn’t make the picnic, don’t forget the next get-together at the Dogstar on Thursday at 7pm!
It’s been a frantic weekend, with a Makerhood stall at the Urban Art Fair in Josephine Avenue, a Makerhood workshop with Pam Williams at the Lambeth Country Show in Brockwell Park, and handing out Makerhood flyers at the show and around Brixton Village.
Oh – and did we mention that the Makerhood website went live at noon on Saturday? Since then, we’ve had more than 1,000 unique visitors and almost 12,000 page views. More importantly, we’ve made our first sales and had lots of new members signing up. People have also started chatting on the forums.
Some of the great comments we’ve had so far:
As we’ve explained, the site is still in beta – this means that you can buy and sell through the site, but we’re still adding new features and styling and ironing out any bugs. So do go and have a look and let us know what you think!
This weekend is going to be a busy one for Makerhood. We’ll have a stall at the Urban Art Fair on Josephine Avenue, and we’ll also be running a sketching workshop and handing out publicity flyers at the Lambeth Country Show.
Urban Art is London’s largest annual al fresco art fair, so it’s a good chance for us to spread the word about Makerhood to both makers and buyers. We also hope to be able to show visitors a working version of our website – how exciting!
As part of our stall, we’ll have six members of Makerhood exhibiting (and hopefully selling!) some of their work.
Elena Blanco is a Spanish artist and illustrator living in Herne Hill. She studied architecture in Barcelona and is inspired by great Catalan artists such as architect Antoni Gaudi and designer Javier Mariscal, as well as 19th-century Japanese prints. She will be selling limited edition digital prints.
Morgan Tipping is inspired by journeys that she has taken in the UK and Europe and from living in India. Her paintings are on ceramic, paper and board – vast landscapes, misty horizons and haunting faces. Since 2010 she’s been painting crowds: crowds of pilgrims in India and crowds wading through flooded streets in Bangladesh, as well as images of post-war rationing of the 1950s in Britain.
Chris Patton is a graphic designer and photographer, who will be selling greeting cards, notebooks and labels. His love of pattern and vivid colour results in products that are contemporary, striking, diverse and quirky.
Emily Wilkinson is an illustrator, artist and mapper. A professional image-maker and a hobbyist maker of tactile objects, she is inspired by many interests, including ecology, fiction, psychology, poetry, food, learning, language, education, femininity and gender, and communities.
Ray Stanbrook is an experienced graphic designer from south London. He’ll be selling a range of graphic prints and screen prints – all inspired by Brockwell Park.
Gillian Arnold is an artist based in south-east London. She is originally from Belfast, and has a masters degree in textiles from Chelsea College of Art. Gillian prints her own fabric for wall art, fashion and furnishing accessories, as well as working on private commissions.
Urban Art Fair is open 10am to 6pm on both Saturday and Sunday 16 and 17 July, on Josephine Avenue, SW2. It’s just around the corner from Brockwell Park, so you can also visit the Lambeth Country Show. So come and meet us and some of our makers!
We came across this today (thanks Rachel!), and thought many of you would be interested in it; news of London’s first Renegade Craft Fair.
Typically based in the States, Renegade organise annual free-to-attend events focussing on “DIY and indie-craft culture”.
This Autumn, London joins the ranks of Brooklyn, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin on their list of venues.
We’ve been a little quiet on the blog front recently, but rest assured we’ve been anything but idle. Work behind the scenes is approaching fever pitch, with lots of exciting things to share with you very soon!
After our successful round of Makers Meetings (of which more anon) we also wanted to share with you some other opportunities to meet us, fellow makers, potential buyers and other interested parties.
You’re very welcome to come along to as many of these sessions as you want, including our team meetings. Our ambition has always been for Makerhood to be shaped by you, so feel free to pitch in whenever you want, however you want!
Here’s what’s happening when:
Due to popular demand we’ve added two new dates to the diary.
Each session lasts about 90 mins. They are very informal, and designed to give you an opportunity to explore the Makerhood (beta) website, find out more about the project, meet the team and see how you could be a part of this exciting new online – and offline – community.
We’ve had a great response from our first two Makers’ Meetings, including the fact that many local makers love the chance to meet people like them who are doing creative things.
So, as well as finding out more about Makerhood, these sessions are also a chance for you to grow your network and meet interesting local people with similar passions and interests to you.
We’ll post more about what we’ve learned from the sessions in due course. In the meantime, find out more these sessions – including the other dates available – here.
Do sign up, tell your friends, and come along! We look forward to meeting you.
The excitement is rising, as the basic infrastructure of the pilot Makerhood Brixton site is in place. So now we’re organising workshops to get the first sellers on board.
If you’re a local maker, artist or grower, these meetings will give you the chance to:
Details of workshops are as follows:
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Date |
Time |
Place |
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Thursday 9 June |
7-8.30pm |
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Saturday 11 June |
10-11.30am |
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Tuesday 14 June |
7-8.30pm |
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Friday 17 June |
4-5.30pm |
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Saturday 18 June |
3-4.30pm |
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Saturday 25 June |
3-4.30pm |
For more information, see Makers’ Meetings.
If you’d like to join, please tell us:
On 26th January 2011 Kristina and I went to an UnLtd Award Winners day (I know that’s ages ago – we’ve been busy!!). During the day UnLtd advisors talked about what UnLtd can do for us, introducing us to UnLtd Connect and their legal clinics (which Makerhood has since benefited from), helping us to develop an elevator pitch and giving us all manner of other useful tips and advice. However, the best part of the day was meeting all of the other award winners and hearing about the projects they are setting up. I thought you might like to hear a little bit about about them and the wide, wide range of social enterprises that UnLtd support (thank you UnLtd!).
Serious About Youth
Paul Matthews was an UnLtd award winner back in 2009 for the project ‘Serious About Youth’ which he set up with his lifelong friend Rommell Wallace in 2008. Paul came back to the Awards Day to tell us about the highpoints and challenges of life-after-awards. Serious About Youth are an organisation based in London offering workshops on topics such as effective communication, attitude and creative thinking. The workshops aim to inspire, guide and support young people to gain the life and social skills needed to live fulfilling lives and progress successfully in the ‘real world’. The workshops draw on Rommell’s work as a poet to create fun, interactive environments for learning. Serious About Youth are an UnLtd success story, gathering great reviews from teachers and students so it was a little sobering to hear Paul talk about the continuing difficulties of balancing full-time work alongside running a social enterprise which doesn’t earn enough to pay any wages (yet). It seems like having an understanding boss is key here! See say-youth.org
Stepping Up UK
Angela Nairne is a 2010 UnLtd Award winner for Stepping Up UK which supports young care-leavers age 15 – 25 with projects that focus on wellbeing and life-skills such as budgeting, voting, environment, D.I.Y and nutrition. Based in Southwark, London, Stepping Up Uk also has an on site employment, education and training advice service in partnership with Peabody. See http://steppingupuk.org.uk/
Bob Lectures
The Best of Bristol Lectures website brings you talks by a range of the very best lecturers that Bristol University has to offer. Is it possible to resist talks with titles like “Quantum chemistry, or why we don’t fall through the floor” and “Secrets of Social Success: Ants and Us”? (Answer, not if you’re a geek like me!) The site was founded by Tom Corfield and his UnLtd award will help him extend Bob Lectures to other universities. See www.boblectures.org.uk
Food From The Sky
The brilliantly simple concept behind Food From The Sky is community gardens on the roof of supermarkets growing food to sell in the supermarket below while providing a learning and educational space for the different part of the communities. In one simple idea the project addresses sustainability in food production, urban gardening and learning about food growing. Food From the Sky initiator Azul-Valerie Thome set up the first garden on the roof of Budgen’s supermarket in Crouch End, London, last year. And they are already selling vegetables, fruits, mushrooms and herbs grown to organic standard in the shop every Fridays. The mushrooms are grown inside the lift shaft apparently.. Check out http://foodfromthesky.org.uk
The Hackney Pirates
The Hackney Pirates (great name hey?) are a group of teachers and social entrepreneurs working to develop core literacy skills and creative ability in young people. Led by Catriona Maclay the Hackney Pirates (not surprisingly, based in Dalston, Hackney) aim to achieve this by giving young people one to one attention in an unconventional learning environment. Supported and hosted by Bootstrap Company, a social enterprise that has been running for 28 years, the Hackney Pirates use the diverse skills of local volunteers to provide alternative and inspiring role models and help young people develop the skills they need to achieve. Last summer Hackney Pirates ran 4 week-long creative workshops with a different creative product being produced each week. This model is now being trialled in a term-time context. See more at www.hackneypirates.org
Great projects hey? And the best thing is that the people behind them are lovely!
Not only that, but these were only the people who I spoke to, there were 25 more people there who I imagine had equally fantastic ideas for supporting their communities. In all, it was great to be in such good company, and we’re very happy that UnLtd chose us to be part of their community of award winners.
Our post-it note research meeting in Brixton Market
It’s been a busy month for Makerhood. Just a couple of days before the fabulous Xmas card making extravaganza that Kristina wrote about earlier this week we held a small workshop with potential sellers and buyers about the Makerhood website. The website will be the heart of Makerhood and we’re keen to make sure it reflects and fits with the local community. With this in mind we asked Aoife and Anne (our friendly usability professionals) to help us organise a meeting to gather thoughts on different aspects of the website. The three areas we were especially interested in finding out about were:
What do you understand by local?
What kinds of items do you imagine will be sold on Makerhood? How do you imagine they would be organised?
How would you like to buy/sell items on the website?
Being the creative girls that we are we didn’t want to put these questions directly to our participants so we came up with some drawing and post-it note activities to help us collect participants’ ideas in a more conversational way. The meeting was held in Cornercopia’s lovely new dining room heated by wood-burning stove so we could all sit round the long table, stick our notes on the window and talk happily together about south west London, online shopping and making.
For the first activity we created a communal map of our ‘local’ areas. These reached much further than I imagined they would – from Camberwell to Dulwich, down past Clapham to Balham and Tooting and up to Vauxhall and the river. Interestingly, people described their ‘local’ area in terms of people and places they knew – places they had lived, shops they used and familiar routes to work.
Thoughts about local
Next we asked our participants to write down all of the items they would like to see sold on Makerhood. Once again, my expectations were completely wrong (which just proves the value of doing research..) Alongside the craft and gift and homewares products I expected participants also told us that mostly they shop local for services such as bicycle maintenance, plumbing and classes. The main reason for this seemed to be that you don’t want to have to go too far to find these services because many of them centre around the home.
OK, people did mention some products..
Finally, before we moved to the Dogstar and drinks and chat, we asked participants to draw a timeline of how they imagined a sale would take place on Makerhood either from the point of view of a buyer or a seller. In this activity we were interested in what participants thought would encourage them to make a purchase or, alternatively, what would put them off doing so. People talked about the importance of ratings and reviews from both the buyer and the sellers perspective, for instance, sellers may have concerns about biased reviews while buyers are interested in a sellers reputation. We will definitely be thinking more about this as we develop the website.
Thanks to Zoe from SW Craft Club, Fiona from Oh Sew Brixton, Maya, Anne and Aoife for taking part.
Makerhood 