Watermountain Studios is in the business of Making, and helping people Make.

Making

We Make things around here.  Most of the Making that we do is connected with sewing and knitting, but we do some woodworking and bookbinding as well.

You can find things that we Make for sale here on our Etsy site.  You can also commission something from us directly.

Teaching Making

We provide consulting and coaching services to schools, libraries, churches and other institutions that want MakerSpaces or Maker programs as part of their curriculum or community service profile.  In more than ten years, we’ve noticed a few things — it’s rarely about the tools your MakerSpace has; it’s more often about the people that staff them.  Investing in staff training does more for a MakerSpace than buying a fancy new CNC machine (although that helps).

In general, we believe that Teaching Making involves these core principles:

• What the Hands Make, the Mind Knows
• Take 2-dimensional materials to make 3-dimensional objects
• Use tools to make tools to make things
• A picture is worth a thousand words (teach visual thinking)
• A part is worth a thousand pictures (making something is as complicated as writing a research paper)
• Build finished things, not junk (low resolution prototypes have their place, but focus programs on building things).

We write about all these things on this blog from time to time, but a lot more gets posted by our chief creative, Andrew B. Watt, at his blog.