The Makerspace, housed in Benedum Hall and associated with the Swanson School of Engineering, has various types of mechanical tools and supplies for student work. However, if 3D printers and power tools are daunting, the student-run Makerspace hosts all kinds of workshops with varying difficulties and skill sets required. The Makerspace hosted a crochet workshop on Thursday for any Pitt student or faculty member interested.
Members of the Makerspace’s student leadership team ran the crochet workshop. Sarah Shegogue, a senior bioengineering major and the Makerspace’s program manager, oversees every workshop and speaker event that the organization hosts.
“Our workshops range from machine learning, soldering, to … crocheting, making candles and making tote bags. The biggest goal of the programs is to introduce people to our spaces and teach them how to use our machines,” Shegogue said. “We have a very heavy technical space, very engineer heavy, but we want to bring in people and have them realize that this isn’t an intimidating space — this is a cool place to hang out, that we are very welcoming and anyone can be a maker if they want to.”
The workshop started with an introduction to crocheting terms and supplies. The Makerspace provided the necessary hooks and their corresponding yarn sizes. Caroline Throener, a Makerspace mentor, instructed the workshop. Throener started with basic stitches like chains and single crochets, then moved on to more advanced techniques like treble crochets. Throughout the workshop, various mentors walked around the space and addressed individual requests for help.
The idea for the Makerspace’s crochet workshops came from a former mentor of the program a few years ago. Student participant and mentor feedback is a crucial part of the Makerspace’s programming.
“We get a lot of input from our users and also our mentors. A couple years ago, we had a mentor, who has since graduated, who was very passionate about crocheting and wanted to teach other people, so we gave them the opportunity to and have kept it going since,” Shegogue said.
The goal of hosting less engineering-focused workshops alongside engineering-based guidance is to get more students in the space. Hosting workshops allows the leadership team to grow a sense of community and display the openness of the mentors and students who frequent the Makerspace.
“That’s kind of the idea behind the crocheting workshops, candle making and tote bags, is to bring in a new group of people that we don’t get generally,” Shegogue said. “Hopefully, they stick around for more technical workshops and realize that maybe they can make [more] in the spaces.”
Makerspace mentors and their friends made up a large portion of the workshop attendees. Cole Hansen, a junior computer engineering major and mentor at the Makerspace, attended the crochet workshop as a participant. Though Hansen is a mentor, this was his first time crocheting.
“I don’t think this is something I would have picked up or tried to learn without [the workshop] … It’s fun to see how many unique things I can do that I wouldn’t be able to do without the space,” Hansen said. “That was one of the things I really enjoyed as I have been in the Makerspace a lot — [getting] familiar with a bunch of things that I don’t really do. So I find [the workshops] really fun and inviting.”
Community is a key part of the Makerspace for the leadership team. Due to its student-led nature, the space is dependent on peer communication and leadership. Kara Nghiem, a senior bioengineering major and president of the Makerspace team, appreciates the community that the team has built.
“Definitely the community down here is one of my favorite things about it,” Nghiem said. “The more I was involved, the more I learned. It opened doors for me to new opportunities, like job opportunities and grad school opportunities.”
This sense of community keeps frequenters of the Makerspace connected, even after graduation. Rachel Eskander, a resident of Los Angeles and Pitt bioengineering graduate, stopped by the workshop during her visit to the Makerspace. Eskander served as the program manager during her time as an undergraduate at Pitt and reflected on her time as a part of the Makerspace team.
“[The Makerspace] gave me an outlet to be creative and fun in a place where I thought that school was going to be very serious, and a lot of our classes are not always the most fun,” Eskander said. “It also gave me a community of people to kind of just be myself with, go to them with my problems with my projects as well as my problems with my life. It was just like a group of people that you can do almost everything with and be as stupid as you want, and they will still admire you for how smart you are — they are very uplifting people.”
The strong sense of community and peer support is what drew Eskander to the Makerspace in the first place. She became inspired to help and lead others by the student mentors who taught her.
“When [I] came to the Makerspace, it was the most welcoming group that taught [me] that you can do it, and if you can’t, you’ll mess up and learn,” Eskander said. “[I was] so inspired by it that [I] decided to spread that to other people.”