Library offers crafting space for recreation and education

09/24/2024

OK, so you’re not into amigurumi, the Japanese art of knitting or crocheting small stuffed animals and dolls.

Perhaps you’re not in the mood to print your very own 3D red dragon complete with moving part, or glue pipe cleaners, sequins and flashy strips of cloth to a discarded children’s toy to create a truly unique tabletop ice breaker.

No, you need to make a really good poster. Right now, for tomorrow’s class. Or you must come up with a set of mugs sporting your organization’s logo to serve as giveaways during an upcoming open house.

SUNY Cortland’s Makerspace has you covered for all of the above and more. Located on Memorial Library’s second floor in Room B-20, between the Instructional Resources Area and the Computer Applications Lab, it offers an array of resources that are there when you need them or when you just feel creative.

Tucked away in this spacious room, the stations range from 3D printers, robotics kits and virtual reality equipment to fiber art and craft materials. All are all free to members of the campus community. Just bring your inquiring mind, a little elbow grease and a spirit of fun and adventure.

“There’s a lot of soft skills our students learn by making things that are valuable to them,” said Karen Dafoe, emerging technologies librarian, who joined the university in summer 2023, just before the Makerspace’s consolidation to its current upstairs location. Dafoe now manages the service with the help of two work study students.

Soft skills are character traits and interpersonal skills that characterize a person’s ability to interact effectively with others, according to Investopedia. Psychologists may use the term “soft skills” to describe someone’s emotional intelligence quotient (EQ) as opposed to intelligence quotient (IQ).

“Plus, it’s really good for developing mental health and wellbeing,” said Dafoe, who is the first professional staff member hired for her role at Memorial Library.

“I’ve had many students making stuff who are saying, ‘Ah, this is so nice,’” Dafoe said. “But it’s not just stress relief. They enjoy coming in here and creating things. You learn organically while working on projects.”

Recreation aside, the 3D printers are also used by faculty members and one student to design customized tools for their artwork, teaching or research in the arts and sciences.

The Makerspace also features video recording equipment and a separate room available for small group collaborations called Inspiration Station, located downstairs in the Phylis Duke Fralick ’58 and Fredric Fralick ’59 Teaching Materials Center.

For five years prior to coming to Cortland, Dafoe served as a school librarian in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There, she started integrating robotics and 3D printing and project-based learning into her elementary library classes, which she supported by writing about $25,000 for grants.

Before COVID-19 shut everything down, Makerspace was operated on the first floor with the help of a collaboration of Makerspace committee members with an academic focus.

“I came in and advocated for recreational use,” Dafoe said.

Since opening last fall, Dafoe has encouraged faculty, staff and students to offer workshops to bring new visitors into the space. Walk-ins are also very welcome.

“I’ve read a lot about what it takes for someone to walk through a door on an unfamiliar space, especially if there’s a lot of high-tech machines and you don’t know if you belong,” Dafoe said.

In Fall 2023, Casey Pennington, a Literacy Department faculty member, offered her class a “Hack Their Toys” workshop, using the Makerspace’s seemingly endless supply of classic crafter trimmings like colorful felt and pipe cleaners. Students brought in their old toys with their old stories and would then take them apart and reassemble them in unique ways while creating a new story.

Using ‘Sid,’ the sadistic antagonist from the movie ‘Toy Story’ who ripped toys apart and put them together in grotesque ways, as inspiration, Pennington created a ‘Frankentoy,’” said Dafoe. Makerspace now has an area dedicated to random toy tinkering.

More creativity followed. The crochet club’s workshop last spring used the fiber arts wall packed with yarn skeins donated by the Art and Art History Department. School of Education students now produce customized t-shirts in preparation for their teaching semester. The button-making machines give students a quick way to produce a free giveaway with a catchy message. One especially “crafty” student used the space’s sewing machine to turn a hooded sweatshirt into an off-the-shoulder affair complete with a matching tube top, converted from the hood.

One of the first things that draws a student into the room is the chance to use the Makerspace to produce a poster, which can give a student a real classroom edge.

“It makes them a little more professional looking than them handwriting it,” Dafoe said.

Students can use Cricut, a machine that can be programmed to cut paper, vinyl, wood and other materials into exquisite custom shapes or patterns, which then can become decals to be attached to a mug or another gift or prize object. The machine can also be programmed to write on the piece.

Dafoe’s staff helped with Red Dragon Fest last spring by using Cricut to create an elaborate poster to advertise the starting point of one event activity, the paper airplane challenge.

The room’s several 3D printers are visibly and audibly popular, rumbling away on the latest creations. Students’ clever riffs on Red Dragon themes decorate the room, customized from designs shared on the internet, along with variations of Dafoe’s own internet-hacked creation, the colorful, scaly and jagged “Dragon Egg” planters, some of which custom-fit into small mason jelly jars.

Makerspace hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Thursdays and noon to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and other hours by appointment at makerspace@cortland.edu. Visit the Makerspace LibGuide for more information.