I’d like to encourage all of you (myself included) to make more things. I don’t care what kinds of things you make, but make something. You can do it by yourself, or you can work with someone else, or you can make something based on someone else’s work. Here are some suggestions of things you can make:
A bowl of pasta with homemade sauce and meatballs
A robot that you can play catch with
A story about a girl and her pet rat
A webpage that generates new, exciting, and sometimes nonsensical jokes about noses
An edit to wikipedia about a topic that interests you
A quilt for someone you care about like a pet
I enjoy every part/phase/stage of making.
There’s the planning stage, where you try and come with ideas, turn them around in your mind and tweak them until you can bring it into the world.
There’s the scavenging phase where you find and bring together all of the pieces/thoughts/feelings you need to make the thing inside your head(s).
There’s the doing phase, where you take something like a blank page, an existing project, or a box of parts and transform it into something new/different/better/worse than it was before
And then it starts over again. The thing you’ve made eventually changes again. Sometimes it’s entropy as it falls apart. Sometimes it’s you, coming back to tweak what you’ve created because you had another idea. Sometimes it’s teeth, because you’ve baked a delicious cake and there’s no point in letting a cake go to waste.
You’ll be able to look forward to some part of the making process, or think back to the end result and it’ll make you smile or frown or both.
If you need help making things, or want to share the things you’ve made, or you’re looking for people who like making just as much as you do, you should see if there’s a hackerspace/makerspace/sewing club/quilting mafia/organic food co-op near you and you should get involved. We humans are social creatures.
Wesley Ellis
[email protected]
The internets
PS
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