Below are some of the EAB participants, but by no means all of them, check HERE for more.

With all the summer success, we are however looking for bike donations to replenish our stock. As well as any tools / repair stand that would help give every participant a good place to work. Also, now that school is back in session, EAB will continue on September 17th from 4:00pm – 6:00pm, we hope to see many new faces there!

paper used to cover the chip board book covers

DAY (Detroit Asian Youth) Project, a group for Asian American youth in Detroit focusing on social justice issues while developing leadership skills using popular education methods, spent the day making things with our hands. After a few weeks on the computers editing video footage for our forthcoming video on stereotypes, it was good to get our hands dirty with paint, glue and dye.

We made accordion books, silkscreened and tie-dyed, and a some of us made earrings out of copper wire, denim and cloth, or learned how to knit.

The accordion books were pretty straightforward: 2 pieces of chip board (cardboard would work, too) and nice bookbinding paper, which we folded into a four-part accordion. We then glued the 2 outside pieces to the chip board and voila! a book is born. Jina also taught us how to add extra pages with a “hinge,” essentially a smaller piece of paper folded in half the long way that you glue to the two disconnected accordion pages (check out this link for better instructions and pictures http://www.booklyn.org/education/isaccordion.pdf)

half-finished accordion book

Our afternoon silkscreening session was almost a disaster because Meiko wasn’t paying attention and burned the image backward onto the screen, so that when we printed it, the whole thing could only be read in the mirror. Luckily we didn’t panic, and improvised a way to print through the side of the screen that is normally laid flat on the table.

don’t do what we did and burn the image backwards!

We finished off the day with tie-dyeing (shirts have to soak up the dye, so they won’t be ready for another day or so) and honed our fine motor skills with knitting (tricky, but we catch on fast!) and jewelry-making, which involved bending copper wire and sewing it onto denim with clear fishing line, and adding metallic paint or fabric for embellishments. For more photos of our work and summer activities, you can check out our tumblr page: day-project.tumblr.com

Allysen hanging shirts to dry

Thanks so much to Makerspace for allowing us to use their amazing space and their screen-printing equipment and darkroom!

After our success with poster printing with stencils, we decided to adapt our stencil learning into a shirt screenprinting process. We cut out a number of stencils and taped them to the back of a screen printing board. Like the spraypainted stencils, we were able to block out sections of the screen and use the holes to pass ink through and onto the shirts.

Check out this video if you want to try it yourself!

Using the CAMEO cutter from last week, we used cardstock to make stencils for spray painting posters. The makers designed two-color posters and applied what they learned about bridges and islands from last week’s sticker exercise. We also learned about aligning posters using registrations marks on each of the stencils, this way the makers can use multiple colors on each poster and tons of different styles and options. We took each of our stencils out to the parking lot and used spray paint to finish up the posters.

As part of the “Say it with Graphics” AwesomeShop, we tried our hands at using the Sihouette CAMEO cutting tool to make vinyl stickers. From idea, to file, to sticker in minutes, the Makers were hard at work flexing their creative muscles.

While working on the Silhouette Studio program, we learned about how to make “bridges”, the small lines connecting floating “islands” shapes in some pictures, so we can go forward and make better stickers, stencils and posters next week.

Go Raven!!!  Full article can be found here

The Discotech was tons of fun and a great learning experience for all!  Check out various articles written about the event by the Michigan Radio, the Michigan Citizen, and the New America Foundation Open Technology Initiative.  Also, learn more about the the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition.