Dear Makers,
It’s been an incredible year for Juneau Makerspace. It’s been wonderful, it’s been wild, it’s even been occasionally weird, and we wouldn’t have it any other way! Thank you all so much for your support, whether you volunteered at one of our events, or just stopped by to check out our space, it meant a lot to us. Looking back over the year, it’s incredible how much stuff happened, got done, and yes, made at Juneau Makerspace.
Just a few of the classes held at the Makerspace included a Wilderness First Responders class, frame making, mandala garden stones, mosaics, writing, and all of the classes offered through the new Juneau Art Academy: intro to drawing, printmaking, and live model figure drawing sessions.
Events hosted included a monthly improv show, an entrepreneur meetup, a prototyping workshop, band practice, a tabletop gaming meetup, and a Game of Thrones watch party. We celebrated the Artpocalypse— our biggest fundraising event of the year— with a fire-breathing taco-eating dragon, a bicycle that knit hats, and a frenzy of fun projects, including letting the community spray paint the outside of the building.
We got out in the community as well. Did you catch our booth at Community Day on Campus, the Maritime Festival, Food Fest, or the Public Market? Did you dance at our Masquerade at the Rendezvous?
There were exciting birthday parties and bittersweet farewell parties. We built soapbox derby cars for the 4th of July and furniture for our homes. We made candles, slime, collages, protest signs, laser engraved pictures, 3D printed prototypes, built frames, threw clay, and a host of other projects. Entrepreneurs, actors, musicians, architects, gamers, sculptors, models, and hobbyists of all types came through our doors. The most memorable tour of the Makerspace was definitely the ones given through telepresence robots to UAS students around the state.
We’ve now had over a hundred members of the Makerspace since we began as an organization, and we’re currently at our highest membership rate yet. We continue to improve our services for rentals and work with other groups who need a space to work.
For this upcoming year, we’re looking forward to only getting bigger and better, hosting fundraisers like our annual Artpocalypse coming this fall, and providing space for community groups to hold classes, events, and everything you can imagine. We’ll continue our Open Studio Nights on Mondays from 6 to 8 pm and will look for ways to improve on the format. Come on by to take a tour or just say hi. There are a lot of projects we’re continuing to work on around the space, such as our renovations of the kitchen and bathrooms. As always, volunteers are most welcome.
Juneau Makerspace is made by the community, and funded entirely through memberships, rentals, and donations. Most of the tools we are able to offer the community came to us through donations or long-term loans. This even includes our CNC router and a new laser cutter. The work done to fix up our building and keeping it going has all been done by volunteers. It’s amazing what we can create by working together, and we can’t yet even imagine what incredible things we will accomplish this year by bringing our community together.
Thank you for such an amazing year. I know 2020 will be even better.
Keep on making,
Sam