The new surge of creativity in Wilmington is extending beyond the city’s much-ballyhooed Creative District.
After hip-hopping to temporary sites around town since its founding four years ago, Barrel of Makers, Wilmington’s first collaborative community of tinkering tech geeks and crafters, has settled into a semi-permanent home at the Highlands Art Garage, on West 17th Street in the city’s Highlands neighborhood.
The art garage, a combination woodshop, art studio and classroom owned by Tower Hill School teacher Rich Pierce, gives the do-it-yourselfers adequate space to tackle some of their messier projects while they continue to engage in higher-tech activities at 1313 Innovation in the Hercules Building on Market Street.
“Dust and electronics are not the best of friends,” says Taras Wallace of Edgemoor, the group’s treasurer, in explaining the need for the two sites.
Barrel of Makers meets Wednesday nights and Sundays at the art garage, using it as a maker space, a dedicated building where members can share tools, expertise and skills. The equipment there – a table saw, scroll saw, radial arm saw, chop saw, drill press and numerous smaller power and hand tools – is far more extensive than most do-it-yourselfers could afford to purchase for their own basement or garage workshop.
“The big thing about a maker space is that you’re sharing expensive equipment that you wouldn’t buy on your own,” Wallace says. “And, if you have a tool and you don’t know how to use it, you should be able to ask someone here and get an answer.”
But it’s still a far cry from what NextFab, the Philadelphia-based maker space, plans to install when it opens its Wilmington satellite shop late this year at Eighth and West streets, in the Creative District. NextFab, which brands itself as a “gym for innovators,” is expected to include wood shop and metal shop capabilities as well as the 3D and large-format printers, laser cutters and CAD software that are essential components of contemporary digital manufacturing.
The prospect of NextFab having more and better doesn’t bother Barrel of Makers members, who are pleased with what they have.
“Part of our idea is just to have a place for people to come in and work on stuff,” says Brian Givens of Newark, a mechanical engineer for MCubed Technologies by day and a tinkerer with all things wood and electronics at night and on weekends.
“NextFab really caters to startups, to people who want to make things to make money,” Givens says. “But I’m not trying to start a business. I want to tinker as a hobby.”
To Barrel of Makers members, NextFab is a space, but they’re a community – a mix of people with some who are more interested in technology and electronics and others more focused on traditional wood and metal crafts, but all committed to helping and learning from each other.
Sometimes tech and woodshop come together in a single project.
Earlier this month, at a session at 1313 Innovation, members used design software and 3D printers to create a pendant, which some planned to give as a Mothers’ Day present. This week, they headed over to the art garage to make wooden boxes for packaging the pendants.
“You don’t have to be an artist to participate, and you don’t have to be an engineer,” says Jessi Taylor, Barrel of Makers president. “We’re trying to make things accessible to everybody, to let everyone express their creativity.”
That goal became apparent at the group’s first organizational meeting, in September 2012, when they decided that building a community of like-minded people was more important than having a space in which to meet.
“Some were interested in having laser cutters, but most wanted a way to collaborate, and that was something we could do without having a dedicated space,” Taylor says.
The group has grown steadily. Its mailing list now numbers about 200, and 30 or so people show up regularly at its events.
For more than a year, Barrel of Makers found a temporary home at the Creative Vision Factory, the state-funded drop-in art space on Shipley Street that fosters creativity among individuals in recovery with behavioral health issues.
Michael Kalmbach, Creative Vision Factory’s executive director, doesn’t recall exactly how he met Taylor – he believes she consulted with him on the mechanics of setting up a nonprofit organization – but he said he immediately recognized “a lot of kinship” between his constituents and the new group of crafters. “They were like an affinity group to the Creative Vision Factory, and they had absolutely no problems working, interfacing with our members,” he said. “So it made a lot of sense to support them early on by providing access to this space.”
The link with Kalmbach led to another early success for Barrel of Makers. When one of his business associates mentioned to him that she was looking for a sponsor for the Odyssey of the Mind team at her daughter’s school, Kalmbach linked the student group with Barrel of Makers.
They collaborated to design a more durable version of the “drawbot,” a drawing robot that the Barrel of Makers had developed in 2013. The device, controlled by a joystick, enables individuals with physical limitations, to draw more easily on flat surfaces. The students, with mentoring from Barrel of Makers, built seven drawbots and demonstrated their utility with clients at the University of Delaware’s Center for Disability Studies. The effort won the students the national 2014-15 Odyssey Angel award for using technology to creatively solve a problem and benefit the community.
When not meeting at Creative Vision Factory, Barrel of Makers has used community rooms at public libraries for meeting spaces. They have also demonstrated their projects at the Brandywine Festival of the Arts and the New Castle County Ice Cream Festival at Rockwood Park.
“Libraries are a good outlet for us,” Taylor says. “We’ve taught software programming, soldering, working with textiles…. The libraries have been generous about letting us in.”
This summer, through grants from New Castle County and the Next Generation Fund of the Delaware Community Foundation, Barrel of Makers will offer a series of teen-oriented tech programs at six county libraries.
At one library session early last year, Barrel of Makers demonstrated making Valentine’s cards illuminated by LED bulbs linked to a circuit board by copper wire and mounted on card stock. Megan Anthony, community manager at the 1313 Innovation co-working space in Wilmington, attended the workshop and made a card.
“My card was terrible, but I enjoyed the experience,” Anthony says.
Through the workshop, she recognized Barrel of Makers as a natural fit at 1313 Innovation, and the group now meets there on Monday nights, when it has access to 3D printers and other high-tech devices available there.
Back in the Highlands, Simon Hamermesh, a onetime professional glassblower who now works as a software developer for a major bank, is helping a woman use a table saw to cut pieces of wood for a cabinet she is making.
“If you know how a tool can hurt you, you can avoid getting hurt,” he says. “You can make a cut in three seconds, but it takes much longer to set it up so you can do it correctly.”
For that reason, Barrel of Makers, like other operators of maker spaces, requires its members to take a safety training session before using its equipment on their own. As part of the class, participants will learn to make a napkin holder – so they also come away with a feeling of accomplishment. The safety class costs $25 and is offered on Sunday afternoons, Taylor says.
Barrel of Makers charges no dues, at least for now, but there are fees for some of its classes, Taylor says.
“When I was an artist, I needed a place like this, but it didn’t exist,” says Hamermesh, a 2006 Brandywine High School graduate who lives in north Wilmington.
“Where was something like this when I was in middle school, or in high school?” Wallace wonders. “I wanted to work with my hands and do design work.”
Now she sees the opportunity for Barrel of Makers members to impart their knowledge to others.
“I find it very rewarding to be able to each people, especially teenagers, the things I wish people had taught me,” she says.
