The Maker Faire season is here at last!
First out of the block is Newcastle here in the UK – this weekend, the 12th and 13th March at the Centre for Life.  This faire is smallish if you compare it to the Mama Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area one in May, but it’s largish if you compare it to something else. They’re expecting a decent 5000 or so makers to turn up from all over the UK and hang out for the weekend. Come and join us!

We had a great laugh there last year and made some cool new friends, like Indie Biotech, the lovely soldering teachers, and arch-photographer and customiser @lloydyp.  The lineup is longer this year, and now includes some of the most active UK based Instructablers, the new project funding site getitmade, and some cool foodie looking people called DIY Pie, so it looks like it’s gonna be even cooler! We’re getting excited putting together all our stuff for the stand …

We decided to mix it up this year, and bring you some other rocking repair stuff as well as sugru. Say hello to the HACKquarium Repairium – the traveling roadshow spreading the joy of a life of repairing.

Come along and mend your socks and moth-eaten scarves with Woolfiller, learn a modern twist on the ancient Japanese ceramic repair technique called Kintsugi, and hack your stuff better with sugru for free on the day, and get your mits on kits of all of the above to take home!

Come and play!

We are about as excited as we’ve ever been in our lives this week. Why? We’re going to Bay Area Maker Faire! It’s on this weekend and, well, this has always been a dream for us. We’re pinching ourselves…

If you’re in the San Francisco area, come and see us! We’ll be in the MakerSHED, and we’ll have a demo / hacking workshop area with lots of sugru for you to try out there and then. Dig out those things waiting to be hacked and repaired and bring them along – we’ll give you enough sugru to do your project there and then. We may even have a few prizes for best hacks

And, well, how could we refuse an amazing opportunity to work with the supreme hackers at our favourite magazine in the world…. we’ve worked round the clock recently to make a limited number of packs for MAKE (on top of the sugru stock we’re building for sugru.com) that you’ll be able to buy from MakerSHED at the Faire.

VOLUNTEERS WANTED Come help us out at the sugru stall
The crowds will be huge, so we’re looking people to join us in our hacking area to show the masses how sugru works. If you’d like to help people hack and make with sugru over the weekend, and meet other sugru fans, we have a few free MF passes for volunteers – email me at jane@sugru.com if you’d like to help — even for just a few hours! We’d love to meet you

(Finally, as you can see from our timeline, we’re getting DARN CLOSE now. That means more exciting announcements soon.)

The big weekend in the UK maker calendar is nearly here! This is the second year for the UK Maker Faire which is a baby of the big beast in California every year, and it’s on this weekend March 13-14 at the Centre for Life in the middle of Newcastle.
We’ll be there !
Got a project that could use some sugru? Something broken waiting for a fix? Or a badly needed hack?
There’ll be a limited amount of free sugru available for hacking over the weekend, so email us at hacks@sugru.com, tell us what you’d like to hack / repair / make and we’ll book you in!

If you got our newsletter last month, then you already know about HACKquariums.
Since we put out the call we’ve had lots of really brilliant applications sent back! Helloatto hosted a prototype HACKquarium last night in Belfast, and robots.ie are hosting another as part of the MAKE night at the Science Gallery in Dublin tomorrow night.
We’re just starting to get back to the people who have applied now, and wowee, you guys are cool !!!

So what’s the story?

Well, while we’re scaling up, we want as many of you as possible to play with and enjoy sugru, so we had an idea. Why don’t you lot host HACKquariums (HACKquaria?) … all over the world?
“What’s a HACKquarium then?” you might ask. It’s a good question – we just made it up.
A HACKquarium is a locally hosted night where you get to meet fellow hackers, have a few drinks and stick sugru on your stuff.
You provide the venue and the hackers, and we’ll provide massive blocks of sugru (for free!), as well as some instructional videos and a guide to making your HACKquarium kick ass.
We’re also looking for someone to provide the beer, but still no promises.
Apply to host a HACKquarium in your city, town or garden shed.

Materials maven Chris Lefteri invited sugru to host a hackwarium at 100% Materials in Earls Court on saturday. Thanks to everyone who came along! It was great craic hacking and repairing with you! Most definite highlights were the padded clamp and the broken vase repaired in the shape of lips

Last week the lovely people at Studio Banana, a collection of creative businesses in Madrid, invited us to hold a Hackquarium in their studio. The highlights have to be the guy that hacked his lacross stick so it doesn’t give him blisters, the lady that first said she didn’t need any sugru but then realised actually her sandal needed a hack quite badly (!) , the repaired wingmirror, and the sheer enthusiasm of the crowd. It was a great evening, and as our first official hackwarium, a big learning experience for us – thanks Studio Banana!