Makerspace Urbana, a project of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, is dedicated to enabling the blend of arts, humanities, science and technology. Our mission is to provide an open community lab where people of diverse backgrounds can learn, teach, tinker, collaborate, share, innovate, socialize, and create.

We are a 501(c)3 non-profit charity, and we rely on generous donations from members, visitors, and supporters to keep our space and resources open and free for public use. Your tax-deductible donations also make our many public workshops and events possible.

Your tax exempt one time donation or monthly sustainer subscription helps to ensure the future of Makerspace Urbana as a non profit public resource! Please click on one of the donate buttons below to support us today.

Scroll to the bottom of the page for a list of frequently asked questions on payments and cancellations.

Become a Monthly Sustainer

Help sustain Makerspace Urbana by donating a set amount each month. This option really helps us plan the growth of the Makerspace. Your contribution will be automatically deducted every month. Just choose which ever level fits you the best! Thank you!

One Time Donation

If you have a major credit card (Visa, MasterCard, American Express) donating is easy. Click this button to get started.

Are you a maker, crafter, tinkerer? Have you thought about sharing your making, crafting, tinkering with other people? Then you (yes, you) should fill out the Heartland Maker Fest Call for Makers form today!

The Heartland Maker Fest our yearly event celebrating the amazing makers in Urbana-Champaign and the surrounding communities. And with your help we want to make this years event bigger and more creative than ever.

The Fest will be held at the Lincoln Square Mall in downtown Urbana from 10am to 4pm on Saturday, October 3rd. We’ll provide tables, chairs, and electricity (if requested). We’ll handle all the publicity, and we’ll work with you on connections through Facebook and Twitter to get the buzz going. We are supported again this year by an Urbana Arts Council grant, so there’s minimal cost to be a Maker and attendees will get in free.

Any person or organization who embraces creativity and the DIY spirit and wants to share their accomplishments with an appreciative audience is encouraged to apply!

Heartland Maker Fest 2014

2014 was quite the year for Makerspace Urbana. We expanded our open hours, held more workshops and special events than ever before, and acquired many new cool shared equipment items that are now available to the public! We also had our first annual maker celebration under our new Heartland Maker Fest name and saw huge growth from the previous year.

Thanks to the amazing energy and dedication of Makerspace Urbana volunteers, we were able to organize, host, and attend over 40  special activities this year! (see below) And these are all in addition to our weekly Computer Help Desk, Open Hours, and Py-CU Hack Nights.

We also launched our Five Year Five Hundred Campaign aimed at increasing our monthly sustaining donation amount to over $500 per month. We’re on track to surpass our goal and it’s all thanks to the support of over 30 wonderful community members donating as little as pi ($3.14) each month! If you would like to help the Makerspace remain sustainable and support our growth, consider becoming a sustainer by donating here.

We can’t wait to see what 2015 brings and we hope you’ll join us in making cool things happen!

2014 Makerspace Urbana Special Achievements:

We’re very excited to announce that Design for America has chosen to team up with Makerspace Urbana for an exciting workshop series. This series aims to teach the human-centered design process to the members of Makerspace Urbana and the wider Urbana-Champaign community(all ages, all welcome). This will be carried out through 4 design workshops on urban flooding. In these sessions, DFA students will work in tandem with Makerspace Urbana members to conduct research using ethnographic techniques, reframe a design challenge, prototype, test their designs and re-iterate them based on user feedback from the John St Watershed Steering Committee. By the end of Spring 2015, DFA and Makerspace hope to deliver an installation type product to be handed over to the John Street Watershed Steering Committee.

The prototyping sessions will be a chance for Makerspace Urbana to mentor DFA members and members of the public in the art of making things through various media such as sewing, digital prototyping, 3D printing and other skills.

 So mark your calendars now! And if you would like to receive an email reminder closer to the first workshop date, sign up here!

The workshop series is funded by a grant from the Office of the Vice-Chancellor for Public Engagement.

Schedule:

We were super lucky to have Outta the Mouths of Babes , an amazing local youth radio project, come by with their youth correspondents and explore Makerspace Urbana and Colten’s Electric Waste Orchestra Project. Listen to the awesome results here:

And you can see more photos from the event here.

Last year the Children’s Discovery Museum’s education coordinator (Bethany Thomas) invited us to do a workshop with their Maker Camp. This year we were invited back to have more maker related fun with the wonderful kids at the Unity Community Center. Seven of our Makerspace Urbana volunteers were able to attend and we set up 3 different maker activity  stations for the kids.  One station was our classic soldering workshop!

Soldering is Easy! And kids pick it up really quick.

This girl quickly became an excellent soldering teacher after finishing her own blinky badge.

Another was Led/Throwy/Origami.

Light up origami time!

The new workshop station we were able to provide this time was sewing custom plush dolls! Huge thanks to Judy Lee from the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab for helping teach and put this workshop station together.

The kids got to cut out the patterns they created.

Learned to sew and stitch their pieces together.

And ended up with some amazing creations!

Thanks to the all the awesome kids who made this event a memorable one for all of us.

Full photo album here.

Thanks so much to the over 20 makers and over 650 attendees who showed up to show help make this the biggest UC Mini Maker Faire yet. We’ll have more pictures up soon! Check out UCMakerFaire.com for more info.

Read More

This is the third year we’ve attempted a pewter casting workshop and once again the results were pretty wonderful. Our excellent volunteer/instructor Erich did an awesome job explaining exactly what pewter is and how easy it can be worked with even at home. Then we moved right along to playing with making molds out of silicone putty.

Erich had brought in some some simple wooden carved shapes and objects he picked up at the local craft store that made for perfect items to mold the silicone around.

Many of the attendees also brought their own objects from home that they had decided they would like to create a pewter version of.

After the molds were set (~10 min) it was time to head outside and start melting some metal.

Once we had some liquid metal it was time to start the pouring and see how our molds worked.

Turns out they worked great!

Here’s a cast from a 3D printed pac-man ghost. We even managed to add a hole through it’s head so it could be attached to something.

Thanks to everyone who came for making this a really fun event!

More photos from the event here.

The Living Letter Press made the Urbana Champaign Mini Maker Faire a poster again this year, and it’s beautiful! We love their work. And it just happens to match the purple wall at Makerspace Urbana. Look for it around town soon.

If you need your own unique cards/invitations/posters/whatever definitely keep them in mind. They also run awesome workshops!

Our first ever Summer Make-a-tion 3D printing work happened last weekend and we had a wonderful turnout. James and Brian put together a workshop aimed at introducing people of any and all skill levels to our 3D printer.

With no previous knowledge required all participants were able to find 3D models to print online and personally customize them using free and easy to use online resources.

After every group had customized and generated their 3D part we loaded them all up into the 3D printing software and printed them all together in one run.

The Maker Space Urbana Solidoodle 3D printer  is free to use and available for people whenever the space is open (check the calendar or join our facebook group for times). Plastic and maintenance for the printer are payed for by a donation jar sitting next to the printer so please contribute if you are able.

Now come print something!

More photos from the event here.

Resources from this workshop:

• Workshop Presentation
• 3D Printing Handout