On Monday we got more in touch with our artsy side during an Instructables Build Day with Lumi Inkodye. Instructables is sponsoring monthly build nights/days for makerspaces all over the world. Instructables is a well known website where members share their DIY projects with step by step tutorials. It is obviously quite quintessential to the Maker movement.

The Lumi kit sent to us was just enough for a session of 15-20 people so if you managed to grab yourself a ticket, consider yourself lucky. This was the first time Lumi was ever being used in Zambia. So what is Lumi and who are Lumi.co? Lumi.co are the minds behind the Lumi printing process, a revolutionary photographic print process for textiles and natural materials. They’re taking photography out of the darkroom by using sunlight to make durable prints on sustainable materials.

On the sleepy Monday morning, it took some time for all the guests to arrive. But Lawrence, our resident artist was here just in time to help us set up make some canvas for our art and teach us how to do it on our own. Pretty neat. By the time all our guests arrived, things started to get more live.

The requirements for the event are to make 2 Instructables during the week to earn brownie points and continue to participate in the program.
Unfortunately we had some trouble with our printing in the morning so we couldn’t get our negatives done right away. While we were waiting someone had the brilliant idea of painting the Instructables bot on one of our canvas. So we took to the idea right away, sketched our bot with care and filled it in. It was a great way to see the dye at work. I’ll leave the rest to our upcoming Instructables. (The orange develops pretty fast). When we finally got hold of a printer to get our negatives done, things really got moving. Since we had the right number of guests, each of us were able to have our own personal negative to print onto a shirt.

The day finished quite early and we wish we got more done but it was a fun experience and a great way to start off the week. Oh and even though all was done on the first day, the next morning we completed our second art piece which is a tribute to the BongoHive founders.