LEWISTON — The challenge, as Lily Luttrell gleefully laid it out: Make your way across a swamp in teams of seven people with only two roving safe spots underfoot.
Step off the safe spot (a newspaper) and, ouch.
“A horrible death, being eaten by a shark-slash-crocodile,” Luttrell said.
Fortunately, many teams made it safely across on Saturday.
Luttrell and Emily Terranova, eighth-graders at Gray-New Gloucester Middle School, created the challenge as part of their booth promoting Destination Imagination at Museum L-A’s third annual Lewiston-Auburn Mini Maker Faire.
Luttrell and Terranova were on the Destination Imagination state championship Desert Dolphins team last spring.
“We’re trying to get people to start new teams,” Luttrell said. “It’s a great thing.”
Across from them, teens worked to fling a giant blue ball over a goal post with a robot at the Gardiner Iron Tigers Robotics Team table. Beside them, young kids hammered away — loudly — building wooden desk calendars and ring toss games at a Home Depot booth. It was three floors, in total, of every level of craftiness and ingenuity, almost all of it with a hands-on or touchable element.
Museum L-A Executive Director Rachel Desgrosseilliers said she expected about 600 people to come through the Bates Mill space by the end of the one-day event.
“Technology is our future but so is creativity and the arts,” Desgrosseilliers said.
Brian Wilson and Sara Tardif had a table for their business, Detritus Designs, filled with unusual lighting: an old, electric fence control box turned into a lamp, a stack of seven books turned into a lamp and lampshades made from chopped maps.
“We get inspired by the materials,” Wilson said.
Sheryl Westleigh of Bryant Pond had a table with lots of octopus-inspired jewelry and sat nearby sculpting. She said she liked the maker faire for the interaction.
“Usually, it’s just me selling my artwork and I don’t really get to talk shop,” she said.
Westleigh also displayed what she called “cell culture necklaces,” designs inside actual 35-mm petri dishes. People asked whether there were real germs in there. Nope; all art.
“(Once) a microbiology professor bought five or six of them to give to his students,” she said. “I love when something like that happens.”
kskelton@sunjournal.com
-
- Vincent Minigell, 2, of Auburn hands a Lincoln Log to his cousin, Lilly Guiggey, 7, of Lewiston as they play and create at the Tinkers Refuge display at Museum L-A’s third annual Lewiston-Auburn Mini Maker Faire at the Bates Mill Enterprise Complex in Lewiston on Saturday.
-
- Oscar Gronros, 6, of Hebron tries his hand at making a brick wall inside the Bates Mill Enterprise Complex in Lewiston on Saturday morning at Museum L-A’s third annual Lewiston-Auburn Mini Maker Faire.
-
- Olivia Wagg, 8, of Lewiston, asks questions about a piece of art at the Arts from Parts booth at Museum L-A’s third annual Lewiston-Auburn Mini Maker Faire Saturday. Next to Wagg are her friends, Jasmine and Gavin Curtis, also from Lewiston. Answering Wagg’s questions is Audrey Pelletier, whose father, J.R Pelletier, created the sculpture in his Sabattus studio.
-
- Aidan Cantara, 7, of Lyman, whose mother said he is “obsessed” with “Ghostbusters,” springs the trap to catch ghosts at the Bates Mill Enterprise Complex in Lewiston on Saturday morning during Museum L-A’s third annual Lewiston-Auburn Mini Maker Faire.
-
- Mai Luu, 10, of Auburn, is seen behind a giant screen from an old projection television that the Open Bench Project display was going to use to melt pennies from the sun during Museum L-A’s third annual Lewiston-Auburn Mini Maker Faire Saturday at the Bates Mill Complex in Lewiston.
-
- Bobbie Gilchrist attracts people to her Paper Bull Puppets booth at Museum L-A’s third annual Lewiston-Auburn Mini Maker Faire at the Bates Mill Enterprise Complex in Lewiston on Saturday.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Comments are no longer available on this story