Usually people are working on electrical engineering or software during the Tuesday evening Hardware Hack Night at SudoRoom, but we ventured to the multimedia room in the basement of the OmniCommons. It’s crammed with all sorts of silkscreen presses, fabric dies, scraps for creative making, and of course sewing machines! lots and lots of sewing machines!
One of our engineer nerds wanted to build a wearable that measures Body temperature, but make the attachment more practical. It’s not fun sticking a circuit board on your hand and having to watch for all the connecting wires. So we went downstairs because there’s a cool resource not enough people are using. And what’s nice is that even though it’s a sewing room, half the people there are men, the other half are women/trans! It seems way more fun that way.
There’s always someone super smart and experienced to patient guide us through the process. Sometimes we don’t even know where to start, but talking to a more advanced person helped us chop our project up into smaller parts, working small tangible goals, and also brainstorm creative ideas. It’s a crash course in pattern making, and I was pretty surprised at how much experience a lot of people already had in fashion and design! We’re multifaceted computer nerds.
It’s exciting to document all the cool sewing progress people are making in the upcoming weeks. Once one sudoroom member went downstairs to sew stuff, it felt like two or three joined. It’s the tribe effect! we all started sewing and making stuff all together. The energy feeds on itself!