a few years ago we turned a room in our house into a “maker room”. i suppose in days gone by it might have been called a craft room, but hey, we love the maker culture, hence its name.

as is typical with kids, odin just assumes that everyone has a subscription to make magazine and an entire room dedicated to creating stuff. it amuses us greatly that odin will matter-of-factly tell people that he was doing this or that in “the maker room”. some folks furrow their brows and not have a clue what he’s talking about, but a good number of people are familiar with the emerging maker culture which i guess shouldn’t be so suprising when even the white house is blogging about maker faires and founders of the movement are being honored as whitehouse champions of change.

in any case, we make stuff on a nice, big 7 foot table ( appropriately, it’s made from a door ) and it’s usually as messy as you’d expect a making table to be especially when odin is in the middle of tinkering on a few projects.

i went in the room to find something and loved this “still life” of one small portion of the table with a copy of “How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself” ( first published in 1958! ) and “The Dangerous Book for Boys”, a sheathed knife, an x-acto knife, a cutting mat, bits of paper from various pop-up projects, a pile rubber bands, batteries, , yarn, knitting needles, crochet needles, a crochet project, copper tubing first used to study eddy current braking and now used for who-knows-what and, of course a copy of the latest issue of usa hockey magazine.