Come have dinner and help support MidsouthMakers! Just mention “we’re here for MidsouthMakers” between 4pm-9pm Jan 29th!

A week ago we saw a good condition non-working Ms. Pacman arcade cabinet come across craigslist. After some frenzied emails we had an appointment to pick up the machine. Claudio and I went out and purchased it and donated it to the group. Sonny offered up to take a look at the machine for us, found a prom that wasn’t acting right, so he borrowed a replacement part and low and behold! It WORKS! So now our task is to secure our own replacement part and work on getting the video sorted out. The display has some pretty bad burn in, but it’s playable. We still need to tweak the color a bit. The art and the marquee are going to need some work too. But we’re going to keep working to make it functional and we have some plans down the road to add more functionality! Wiki Project page for this project. Here are some pictures:

Transporting Ms. Pacman

Ms. Pacman Arrives!

Playing Ms. Pacman

Playing Ms. Pacman More!

Working Ms. Pacman

Image by Brandi Dunn

Can you believe it’s October, already? Time to start getting into the Halloween spirit. And what better way to do that than with lots of spooky treats? That’s right, the Midsouth Makers are gonna have a Halloween themed bake sale! We’re gonna have lots of sweets – cookies, brownies, homemade marshmallows, a few whole cakes; there’s even a couple of sugar free goodies. But, wait! That’s not all! We’ll also have a few non-food items, such as hand sewn pumpkins and decorated paper bats.

Sounds like it’s gonna be loads of fun, doesn’t it? Well, the more people we have helping and coming to the bake sale, the more fun it will be. So, we will need all types of help – people passing out flyers, donations of many types (food, non-food, monetary), volunteers for the bake sale, someone taking pictures, people showing off projects to potential victims… I mean, potential customers. Costumes, especially homemade, are GREATLY encouraged.

Here’s the specifics – The bake sale will be held on Saturday, October 30. Set-up time will start at 9 am. The bake sale will go from 10 am to 1 pm. The location is Kevin and Brandi’s front yard, at 850 Avon in Memphis. Here is a file containing the sign up sheet, a set of guidelines for food donations/ingredients list and the flyer. If you have any questions or want to virtually ‘sign’ the sign up sheet, send it to board@midsouthmakers.org and it will be forwarded to Brandi.

Let’s make this an AWESOME bake sale! Be there or beware!

Relief Press Printing is the process of taking a medium, removing specific pieces of it so as to make it thinner in areas, and inking the raised portions of the medium to press onto a desired surface.  The purpose of this workshop is to demonstrate an easy way to create your own linoleum stamps, and more specifically how to apply this to T-Shirts. Through this you can take a linoleum block, carve out any design you wish, and print it onto any shirt that you would like. The cost to participate in this workshop is $20. Because of the cost of materials it is necessary for us to have a very clear number of how many people plan to participate so we are able to order enough supplies. For more information, check out our T-Shirt Printing Wiki.

If you would like to prepay to participate in the workshop, you can visit http://www.midsouthmakers.org/events/ and select your shirt size, and click Buy Now. We’d like to recommend that everyone interested pre pay so we’re able to have shirts and materials for those interested. If you’d rather pay cash feel free to talk to Daniel during any meeting.

At last Friday’s meeting Sonny brought and demonstrated his Doppler Direction Finder Kit. Here’s the video of the demonstration and some questions / answers about it.

MidsouthMakers Doppler Direction Finder Kit Demonstration from Midsouth Makers on Vimeo.

MidsouthMakers Doppler Direction Finder Kit Demonstration by Sonny Mounicou on 8/6/10. www.midsouthmakers.org