Hey, so Makes have launched! Thank you to all the testers for their feedback and for creating their Makes. Go have a play!

We’ve tried to work in the feedback from the testers but a few of the things that have been recommended were not do-able (and not essential) in the short term. Two things particularly stand out:

• Having made a big deal of the ability to commission one of the Makes from the author, we’ve taken that off, for now at least. We’ll introduce this as an option for authors to check in the process rather than as a default. However, you can still point to items of the Make you have for sale in your shop a “can’t be bothered to Make this? Buy one instead”. I like this feature. Of course you need to have one in the shop for sale – if you don’t the text and link will not appear.
• Copyright. We want to be able to give you the ability to manage the rights of your Makes using Creative Commons licensing. This feels right. They are after all, yours. However, we have not had time to build in the Creative Commons element which allows you to choose the license you want so we’ve launched Makes with the existing Terms of Use which gives you ownership of the content but also give Folksy a license to use the content. But we’re all for re-use and sharing and many of you will be too, so the cc license model will be in place in the not-to-distant future.

We really do hope you like Makes. I know there are a heap of tutorials on the web already (mainly on craft blogs). We’re not in any way trying to muscle in on that, rather we want to promote how things are made. This way, people will see the love that goes into your things and consequently be more interested in buying craft things as well as making them. The more we promote what you do, the more we all benefit.

What’s Next?

We’ve got a few more minor amends we’re implementing for the 12th Dec and then the next big milestone is International Sales in late Feb next year.

So, we’re testing Makes this week with a bunch of people who came forward – thank you so much you lot. By the end of this week we’ll have collated the feedback and we’ll be making the amends ready to go live. We intend to go live this weekend and with the “how tos” that the volunteers have kindly offered to document. Here’s a big cheer for:

• Spugmeistress
• Lupin
• Marceline
• Alison
• Lucy
• Sarah
• Nicky

So, having re-plumbed the site and made it more stable and reliable we’re on with getting Makes launched for Monday (it may be late on Monday as we’re running out of biscuits and espresso to keep the development going 24/7). We need your help. We want some early testers to help test Makes and show good examples of how you’ve made things. This could be a simple things or a complex thing or well, anything. The key is to do it well and test the functionality.

Who’s up for that? Anyone? All you’ll need is a bit of time and photos of the ‘thing’ as you’re making it. Of course if you’ve taken images whilst you been making a ‘thing’ before you could “do a Blue Peter” and just pretend it was all done like, now.

For an idea of what we’re trying to do with Makes see The Instructables site. This site covers everything (mad stuff like this) and we’re just going to focus on crafty things rather than say how to do gelatin/agar filtration.

Whilst I’m here. This is nice:

The last few weeks have been really interesting. We’ve seen a heap (collective noun for crafters and designers please?!) of new crafters and designers come to Folksy to list things for sale and many of these have brought with them a different ‘type’ of thing. Like recent graduate Paul Allen’s stuff, above. Brilliant.

It’s great having an online venue to sell and talk about crafts, like Folksy, but I just love well curated, real, markets where you can see and touch things and meet people. There’s a great one in Cape Town called The Neighbourgoods Market, from where the image, above, was taken. It’s lively, there’s an energy and a buzz about the place. The Maker Faire’s in the US run by O’Reilly are a great example too. However, most craft markets in the UK tend to be a bit ‘damp’ but I’ve high hopes for two that are upcoming:

Then we have We Make in London on Saturday 6th Dec on Tottenham Court Road. We’re going to be doing a bit of something around We Make which I’ll talk about later but it’ll be a competition around Makes, which will (yes, honestly, definitely, no excuses) will go live by the 24th November. Woo. I know we wanted to get this functionality out in September but other things got in the way. Anyway, I’ll introduce that Making stuff properly, later.

See more events that we’re watching.