Today was the 2024 Maker Faire at the Wayne County Fairgrounds in Wooster, OH. I had my car packed the night before so I was able to roll out early and arrived at the start of the setup window. I parked right up front, grabbed a cart, and asked a volunteer where my booth was. He was friendly, but not very engaged, and had a little trouble looking up the list. He eventually found the booth and sent me on my way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was glad I got there early since it took me a while to figure out how I wanted to set up my booth to be bright, colorful, and inviting. Took me about an hour and when I was done I went back to the volunteer and asked where I should move my car to since I was right up front. He thought about it for a moment, then decided it was fine just where it was. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which was not the case and I managed to mostly not hear the announcement as I headed into the bathroom about moving out cars. Whatever, my foot was kinda bothering me so I didn\u2019t really want to walk that far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was ready an hour before the event started and had time for the obligatory social media post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then, I waited for the people and turned myself – for 6 hours – into an extrovert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I said hello to everyone. Invited everyone to fold something with me or take a free item from the premade bin. I was polite, engaging – even (gasp) chatty. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The kids, as usual, were the best. I made sure to encourage them and cheer them on when they got a tricky step right. If things went completely sideways, I always made sure to give them the one that I made too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I got to share some fun surprises. If we made a box, I always added a small crane or frog before putting on the lid. The wings on the bird always got a test \u201cflap\u201d and each frog was given a test \u201chop\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had some good conversations with people and gave out my email address to a couple of people that either wanted an interview or for me to attend another Maker Faire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To my delight, I had at least one person request everything on my board. Including one firefly that one little boy did perfectly. It was pretty great. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here\u2019s the final count of the projects I did with people. I was also folding things for the giveaway box the whole time so I don\u2019t know how much I folded, but it was a lot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The day ended up being 2 hours for set up, 6 hours of folding, and an hour to pack back up. I got chided for not calling the coordinator over to sit at my table so I could walk around – but it seemed like I would be doing a disservice to those that came to the event. I did take a short break at the table to have most of a sandwich, but that was it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, it was a long day. But a productive one. I think people had fun and enjoyed learning something new. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Might get some “future folders” out of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today was the 2024 Maker Faire at the Wayne County Fairgrounds in Wooster, OH. I had my car packed the night before so I was able to roll out early and arrived at the start of the setup window. I parked right up front, grabbed a cart, and asked a volunteer where my booth was. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_bluesky_dont_syndicate":"","_bluesky_syndication_accounts":"","_bluesky_syndication_text":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2802,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2801\/revisions\/2802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}