So for the past couple years, I’ve been making these tubes at Christmas time to give to Will and Damion. One of the ones I gave to Will is a sort of Electric Rainstick. I thought it was kinda fun and weird, and I know Will has gotten a lot of use out of it.

Well, to make a long story short, after a recent conversation with someone (I hope to be able to talk more about that conversation soon) I was encouraged to so more with these. So we’re gonna try to get a few together in time for the Maker Faire in May.

I don’t have much more info for you yet, but I do have some advice from Nadja on How Not To Carry Them On BART

Our first video… laugh with us, not at us… well OK, at us if you must.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxtIJIJN2Pw

We are completely Mad.

Several of you have asked “What can I do to help?”

To be blunt, what we need right now is some funds. We’ve taken a pretty big leap, and we know we can do it, but having something to help offset the initial expenses would be really helpful. And grocery enabling.

We don’t want you to just throw money at us and walk away though. That doesn’t sound very fun. Or exciting. So instead, we’d like to offer you a proposition.

We’re going to be printing stuff. Lots of stuff. And we’re going to be selling stuff. Lots of stuff. Really cool stuff. Stuff we can’t tell you about yet because it will spoil the surprise. But if you’re reading this, you probably know us. And if you know us, you can imagine what kind of stuff is going to be coming off our presses. You’ll be able to buy that stuff as it comes out. But if you want to help us out, you can buy a years worth of it now.

Think of it as a subscription to Art. Once a month, you’ll get a box of Art we made. It’ll be packed all nice, signed where it makes sense to do so, even numbered in cases where such a thing is appropriate. You’d get your first one in April, and you’d get one every month for a year. All for $100 - not a month. Total.

But we kinda need it now.

In the event that the Shop goes pear shaped, you’ll still get your monthly box. We’ll just have to make it by hand is all. It comes out to a little less than $10/month for cool stuff we made. We’re going to be offering a fairly small number of subscriptions, and when they’re gone that’s it. So if you want in on the cheap, and you want to help us out, this is totally the way to go. I sure know we’d appreciate the show of confidence.

Paypal link below leads you to the promised land.

I don’t know whose idea this was. I’m pretty sure it was Nadja’s. But let me tell you the story of how we got here.

I was minding my own business, searching some online classifieds for a die press I could use for a skunkworks project I’m working on, when I came across an add. Seems this guy was done with his old offset presses, and was closing up shop. He was selling the whole kit and caboodle. Very reasonable price, serviceable machines, take over renting the space for a really low price.

Totally not a die press. But very very intriguing.

The three of us had been talking, sorta informally, about getting together our little collective maker butts and making stuff together. We already had a name (Makersfield) that we were pretty married to. And we had sorta long term ambitions, but no real starting point.

The more we looked at this, the more it looked like this could be the starting point we had been looking for, just as long as you ignored the fact that we didn’t have the money, don’t know anything about printing, and didn’t know how to really run a printing business. Or a press.

After some discussion, we decided we’d try. It would require a number of things to fall into place. The current owner, the one selling out, he needed to be willing to work with us on getting paid. We’d need to scramble to get some money together. And really, we’d need an awful lot of tailwind. In the end, we got two out of three. We got the owner to work with us, and we got enough together to convince him we were serious. Now all we need is a tailwind.

What are we going to print? Lots of things. That information is classified. We can’t tell you yet. How are we going to do it? Not really sure yet. But we think between the three of us we have enough smarts to work that out. If not, then watching us fail miserably should provide to be highly entertaining.

This here be the Makersfield Blog.  This might be the first post, but Hello World is for chumps.

We’re still getting our legs and stepping out of our heads.  But soon there will be more here to see.

Stay Tuned.