Category: Uncategorized

Lots has been going on here in the Brickyard!  Let’s see…  here’s the rundown:

We’ve officially finalized our Board with the addition of Karen Chacon, an experienced non-profit administrator and developer, committed to all the things we love: youth development, education, community development, diversity and inclusion, and social justice, as well as enjoying a good pint, oh, and baseball.  Meet our Board and our Team here: Meet the Team.

We’re going for it, and launching the Brickyard Free Bikes project.  It’s simple, we teach people how to fix bikes by salvaging cast-off bikes, fix them up, then cycle them back to the community, bad puns included.  Read more here: the Brickyard Free Bike project. Bicycles are high-volume, low yield waste for landfills, and this is a great way to keep them in the community, help people get around, and keep them getting used.

We’ve wrapped up our BrickStarter project, (and continued what seems to be an emerging tradition of bad puns) with over $2500 of donations and membership signups!  This is huge!  Not only does it give us some juice to buy some software and other stuff, but it shows how much y’all are excited about what we’re doing.  THANKS to all our donors and new members!

We’ve had our first weekend of workshops, and are looking for the next two busy weekends – coming up, How to Make Soap, and Breadmaking.  The response has been awesome, and we’re busy lining up the next round.

We’re in the process of placing around $5000 worth of digital imaging equipment into LaVida Scholars in downtown Lynn, so that kids can work with it this summer.  This is a state-of-the-art workstation with a scanner, photo-quality printer, Wacom Cintiq tablet, the complete Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, and SketchUp Pro installed.  We can’t wait to get this stuff into the hands of some budding young designers!

Courtesy of the Lynn Area Chamber of Commerce, we have a bunch of tickets for the local Collegiate baseball team, the North Shore Navigators, on June 9th, (first pitch is at 6pm) ’cause you can’t be busy in your shop all the time, now, can you?  We have over 50 tickets available, so sign up on Eventbrite here.  Join us for a great game and some burgers and dogs!

There’s more brewing…  we’ve been saying “stay tuned” so much lately, it’s getting old even for us, but, well, stay tuned!  It’s going to be a busy summer!  We can’t really spill the beans right now about one event in particular, but let’s just say, keep the afternoon of June 16th open.  You won’t regret it!

 

Keep making stuff. Take care of people, play nice and clean up after yourselves.

OK, work with us on this…  we’re still thinking about the details.  Junk bikes are all over the place, and, well, they’re junk.  They need some work, they aren’t safe or reliable, and they’re really a pain to dispose of.  But, there are folks out there who need bikes to get food, to get to their jobs, to, well, get around.  That’s where we come in.

We collect the bikes.  We teach workshops on how to fix them up and make them safe again.  Then, when they’re all nice and pretty again, we give them to people who can use them.  Seems simple enough.

What we’re thinking at the moment, is to have a little bike rack in the downtown area with a sign that simply says, “FREE BIKES – Take it or leave it.  If you need a bike, take it.  If you want to leave a bike that you don’t need anymore, or that needs work, leave it.”  The rack is chained to something, the bikes aren’t.  We check the rack often, take bikes that need work back, load bikes that are ready to go out on the rack again.  We put stickers on the bikes, identifying them as Brickyard Bikes.

It almost seems too simple.  Too easy.

Let’s count the ways.  We keep a little high-volume junk off the streets and out of the landfills.  People who need transportation get to use the bikes, safely.  We make a little pocket change teaching our workshops, and people learn skills to help themselves and maybe others.   And the cycle repeats.*

Well…  stay tuned.  Email us if you’re interested in this madcap caper, and let’s see what we can make happen.

*Yeah, OK, who could resist that pun?

It’s a little longer coming that we hoped, but finally we have some dates and places for some workshops!  Here you go:

How to Make Soap (Without Melting Your Face): Saturday, May 12 from 10-1pm, LaVida Scholars, 120 Munroe St, Lynn.  Read more and register here.

Bike Repair Clinic: Sunday, May 6th from 1-3pm at the Sloan Machinery Loft Garage, 589 Essex St, Lynn.  Read all about it and register here.

Learn to Knit: Saturday, May 5th from 10-1pm, at the Lynn Public Library.  Read more and register here.

Signing up for the classes is a simple two-step process.

1. First you can click the Register link to send your contact information to us.
2. Next, hit the PayPal button to pay for the class with any major credit or debit card.  You don’t need a PayPal account.

Woodworking and Upcycling:  We’ve put this class on hold for the moment, due to some problems finding a suitable location.  

What with the tools, noise, safety and liability concerns, we’re going to err on the side of caution, and hold off until we get a nice, solid location.  Please stay tuned.  If you’ve paid for this class, and would like a refund, please contact us here, and we’ll be happy to refund your payment.

Some huge news this morning!  We are officially teaming with the Lynn Public Library and their teen makerspace project, dubbed QuaranTEEN.  Right now they have some great tools: Mac workstations, a 3-D printer, Makey Makeys, iPads, and more.  We can offer them even more to work with, including our robotics and electronics gear, our wood and metal shop tools, our plastics and upcycling gear, printmaking, even our photo and darkroom equipment!  We need some spaces to teach our workshops and classes, they need more stuff – it’s a match made in (maker) heaven!

Like most libraries today, Lynn Library is working to keep vital, keep current, and fit into the 21st century.  Makerspaces are very common solutions to keeping the Public Libraries at the center of communities, especially students and young people, and the Lynn QuaranTeen program came out of response and guidance directly from the teen community – and gets tons of use.

For us, it’s a significant alliance with the community.  It’s working with a partner with a proven model, community involvement and the start of a great program.  It’s a place – a physical space – to work with people, teach classes, and help spread the Maker love.

For the Library, it’s access to all of our tools and resources, and more, a possible (probably) avenue for expansion into our final home.  We’re all about STEAM programs, well this is a way to provide in-house STEAM and a bigger, more robust home for the Library’s work in the future.

Read more about the Library here, and be sure to visit the Lynn Library Facebook page and their Lynn Library Teens pages.

Stay tuned, this is just the beginning of great things to come!

 

Keep making stuff. Take care of people, play nice and clean up after yourselves.