Join Penny and Cassian at Machspace for our Hand Stitch Open Day!
Bring your own project or choose from:
Fun cross stitch patterns and kits
Learn ‘painting with thread’ using long-and-short stitch
Make an embroidered rose
Bring your mending project and create a decorative mend
Use our interaction badges – choose to craft quietly or stitch ‘n’ socialise
Image via LovemeoksEmbroidery on Etsy. Pattern will be available to stitch on the open day.
Here’s a few of the cross-stitch kits we’ve bought to share, pay-what-you-feel:
Some of them have beads too!
Plus we have a whole selection of embroidery hoops to go with them, so you can join in even if you’re a complete beginner. We also now have one of those giant magnifying glasses with LEDs on it, which clamps onto the table, like so:
As it’s an open day, Machspace will be open to the public, and we invite you to read our open day rules before attending.
… maybe you like the idea of directing it, by becoming a director or a volunteer?
What does that involve?
By nature, being a volunteer or director means you’re more involved and can shape Machspace in the longer term. You’d be able to share suggestions and be trusted to make decisions for Machspace autonomously.
Open day host
Open days allow non-members to come and have a look at the space and see if they want to join, without having to visit as the guest of someone who’s already a member. Open days are two hours long, happen twice a month, and sometimes have a theme (like knitting or zines or board games).
If you like meeting new people and answering curious questions from members of the public who happened to be passing by, and you can be responsible for a small and easy-going space, while eating as many Tunnocks caramel wafer bars as you want, this is the job for you. You can be a long term open day leader and make bigger decisions with more responsibility, but if you want you can sign up to run just one open day – every hour of volunteering helps us a lot!
If you’re interested, please do send us an email or put a note into our inbox in the makerspace.
This is a role with more responsibility, but potentially less work. Whereas being a volunteer means being involved in the member-facing, day-to-day running of the space, being a director means running the company behind the scenes.
As a director you would have to attend an in-person meeting once every 2-4 months. They’re usually under 2 hours, and there’s usually votes on the legal and practical direction of Machspace. As directors we deal with accounts, legal responsibilities to Companies House, funding applications, meeting grant requirements… We maintain the foundations of Machspace, so that everyone else can benefit.
You could just come to meetings and vote in big decisions, or you could get more involved by helping with accounts, doing grant applications, or proposing policies. More directors means less work for each director, and it increases the resilience of Machspace as an organisation. If you want Machspace to last a long time, become a director!
Again, if that sounds interesting, please send us an email or put a note into our inbox in the makerspace.
Thanks to an exciting £12,500 grant from the National Lottery Awards for All (Wales) scheme, we are delighted to announce that our laser cutter has been ordered and it will be installed in early March!
The laser cutter itself was just a portion of this. The rest is going towards a lot of related and unrelated stuff, like a laptop to use with the laser cutter, installation of something to safely extract laser cutter fumes, an A3 printer-copier-scanner, and an enclosure for the 3D printer. (Though we’re thinking maybe we might wait and use the laser cutter to make an enclosure for the 3D printer actually…?)
Help us rearrange the furniture!
We’ve planned a new layout for Machspace to accommodate everything, and we need people to help us move all the furniture around! Can you come and lend a hand?
It’s this Sunday, 11th February 2024, 11am – 4pm.
In other news
We now have 50 members – the number that we optimistically projected we’d have by the end of the SVFDF grant period in March 2025. We’re over a year ahead of schedule! It’s pretty amazing what this grant has made possible, not least the pay-what-you-feel membership model, and we’re so grateful for it. Just today we bought a bunch of supplies with it and stashed them at Machspace. 🧶🍫🥛
The next open day has a dual theme, two crafts that go together like cheese and pickle.
A zine (pronounced “zeen”) is a homemade booklet, often copied by photocopier, with big counterculture vibes. Informative or arty or silly or serious, they’re versatile and limited only by your own imagination. At this open day we’ll teach you how to make a mini zine using just an A4 sheet of paper, no staples required, and then you can copy it using the Machspace inkjet printer-scanner.
Our badge maker was one of the first things we bought for Machspace, and we’re very proud of it! Put your art into the die with all the right layers, crunch the handle, and voila, now it’s a proper badge. From brain to badge in 3 minutes! Very satisfying. We can do 25mm and 45mm badges.
It’s a drop-in for members and non-members (ages 11+), so feel free to pop by anytime between noon and 2pm. If you’re into the theme you can bring your own art supplies and stickers and washi tapes. Machspace can provide printer paper and printer ink. And you’re very welcome to bring anything else to make instead, or just come to hang out and drink tea.
It’s free to attend, and food, drinks and materials are free – donations welcome but not required.
If you have any questions, feel free to email us: hello AT machspace DOT org
About 15-20 people came to yesterday’s knitting-themed open day including lots of new people, and several people asked if we’d hold another!
So, we are now in search of a new volunteer. Does this sound like you?
Machspace member (or soon to be)
Likes knitting
Likes socialising in groups
Happy to host and take responsibility for the space
This volunteer would regularly host a knitting group in the Machspace workshop, perhaps weekly or fortnightly. Attendees of various skill levels would attend, and be able to help themselves to donated yarn, snacks and refreshments. The volunteer would be responsible for:
Choosing the group frequency and booking the space
Informing the PR volunteer(s) of the dates and times well in advance
Unlocking the space before it starts, and locking it again afterwards
Welcoming new attendees and making sure everyone is comfortable
Informing people about the help-yourself refreshments and snacks in the kitchen
Informing people about the yarn supplies and equipment
Helping interested people to find and fill in the Machspace membership application form
Being a point of contact for potential attendees
Finding other volunteers to support them in this work
The kitchen has new teas and hot chocolate and LOTS of snacks, and a supply of small cartons of cow and oat milk. Also we’ve 3D-printed two towel holders (about 45 minutes each) for the kitchen:
And then we had our festive open day, complete with decorations, mince pies, and shortbread with Christmassy decorations, which was well-attended enough that I was too distracted to get photos of attendees:
And today, we finally got around to replacing the 15 missing and broken lightbulbs!
Our grand opening was on 20th October, and today, almost a month later, we have 14 inducted members and 16 people waiting to be inducted.
We have storage space for members’ projects now:
We’ve also got some posters for members to tell us about what equipment they’d like us to get (some since acquired), and – as we have very limited funds for equipment – a very offline way to informally crowdfund for particular items:
And, since the poster thing has been turning out so well, we added another for sharing materials and coordinating skill-sharing:
Members are invited to write on this poster if they want to teach others how to do their favourite crafts, or if there are particular skills they would like to learn.
Also, our kitchen now has shelves, a sink and a working hot water supply, and a little fridge under the worktop:
Also it’s super duper yellow 🤩
Today’s open day was pretty good, we had a few visitors coming from the repair cafe over the road, and a couple of new members signed up. Cassian and Avery used some salvaged materials (left by the previous pop-up art shop tenants) to create a sandwich board to make the workshop look more open and welcoming on open days:
Things are still pretty chaotic, and occasionally overwhelming, especially with regard to offers of donated items! We have a small space so we have to be quite careful. Also, there are only three volunteers at the moment, with limited time and energy, so we can’t accept anything that needs any kind of mending, maintenance, etc.
We’re sending out emails to applicants once a week or so, to offer time slots for induction, and managing about 3 sessions per week.
Our next open day is scheduled for Saturday 25th November, 12-2pm, but we may not have enough directors/volunteers to manage it – stay tuned! If you want to be sure we’ll be there to show you around, come on Wednesday 6th December, 6-8pm. Open days are intended for everyone, members and non-members alike, to drink various hot beverages and make things together – come along and meet each other!
Membership applications have been coming in since the grand opening, and we’ve inducted several people already, which means people are using their key fobs to access the makerspace whenever they want! We love it.
If you’d like to join, please fill in the membership application form here. And if you’ve already done that, you might have an email inviting you for an induction – get in touch at hello AT machspace DOT org and we’ll find a date and time that works for you. We have availability in the afternoons and evenings most days of the week at the moment, with mornings (hopefully) coming soon.
Open days
We’ve figured out our open day sessions! You can find them on our calendar page here. In summary, they’re Wednesday evenings and Saturday lunchtimes, with one every two weeks or so. The next one is Saturday 11th November, 12-2pm, which coincides with a repair cafe taking place at the Community Hub over the road.
Volunteering
Would you like to help make a makerspace? If so, we would love for you to join in! Machspace is a non-profit run by three volunteers with limited energy and time, so every little helps. Email us at hello AT machspace DOT org and tell us what you’re into!
In particular we’re looking for a woodworking specialist – because woodworking is something a lot of prospective members have expressed an interest in, and none of the directors have much expertise. If you’re proficient with woodworking, carpentry, power tools, etc. and you’re interested in helping out, please take a look at this volunteering “job description”.
Yesterday afternoon/evening we held our grand opening, 3-6pm, and we had about 25-30 guests, lots of cupcakes and cups of tea, and many interested people, lovely and supportive comments, etc. It was so busy that we didn’t even get a minute to take any photos – and we ran out of paper membership registration forms and had to start referring people to the online registration form instead!
This afternoon we inducted our first four members, who now have their key fobs and can let themselves into the space anytime. We also inducted someone on the 3D printer, and just because this blog is for reporting the most important information, their test print was a blue rabbit.
For those of you who weren’t able to make the grand opening, if you want to come and see the space in person before signing up for membership we’ll be holding open days every couple of weeks – probably alternating between weekday-evenings and weekend-daytimes. We haven’t chosen the first dates yet but as soon as we have they’ll appear on the calendar page of this website.
And if you already know that you want to be a member, you can join anytime! It’s a two-stage process – first you sign up using our registration form, and then one of us will be in touch to arrange your induction, where you’ll sign the code of conduct and get your key fob.
We’ve also just started sending the rewards out to our crowdfunders, so if that’s you, keep an eye out. 🙂
It is so satisfying and gratifying to know that our first members are now able to use Machspace, laminating stuff and drinking cups of tea and repairing their whatevers and suchlike! Amazing stuff. Thank you everyone for your support, and we hope to see you at Machspace sometime soon!
