Creativity Abounds at DU's Maker's Market

From pickles to 3D printing, DU students, faculty, staff and community members had the opportunity to show off their homemade goods at the first-ever Maker's Market. The Feb. 28 event was presented by the Center for Sustainability.

First-year student Adam Tooley and Debbie Gale Mitchell, teaching assistant professor of chemistry, sold earrings created from anodized niobium. Tooley created the earrings in a first-year seminar class taught by Mitchell during the fall of 2016. “The class was called ‘Chemistry and Art,’” Mitchell explains. “Basically it was a hybrid between a studio art class and chemistry lab. We explored the chemistry behind visual art and the artistic representations used to visualize molecules and bonds.”

This quarter, Tooley has expanded upon his creation in his rhetoric class taught by Libby Catchings. The class theme involved DIY explanatory writing and focused on processes. “My writing class helped me understand that simply the act of making something can be a statement,” he says. “For me, that statement is ‘put your passion into every movement.’”

Tooley explained the process to his potential customers at the market, and demonstrated the anodization using niobium and borax. View the slideshow below to see more of his work, and some of the other vendors who participated in the Maker’s Market.