LEWISTON — The challenge, as Lily Luttrell gleefully laid it out: Make your way across a swamp in teams of seven people with only two roving safe spots underfoot.

Step off the safe spot (a newspaper) and, ouch.

“A horrible death, being eaten by a shark-slash-crocodile,” Luttrell said.

Fortunately, many teams made it safely across on Saturday.

Luttrell and Emily Terranova, eighth-graders at Gray-New Gloucester Middle School, created the challenge as part of their booth promoting Destination Imagination at Museum L-A’s third annual Lewiston-Auburn Mini Maker Faire.

Luttrell and Terranova were on the Destination Imagination state championship Desert Dolphins team last spring.

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“We’re trying to get people to start new teams,” Luttrell said. “It’s a great thing.”

Across from them, teens worked to fling a giant blue ball over a goal post with a robot at the Gardiner Iron Tigers Robotics Team table. Beside them, young kids hammered away — loudly — building wooden desk calendars and ring toss games at a Home Depot booth. It was three floors, in total, of every level of craftiness and ingenuity, almost all of it with a hands-on or touchable element.

Museum L-A Executive Director Rachel Desgrosseilliers said she expected about 600 people to come through the Bates Mill space by the end of the one-day event.

“Technology is our future but so is creativity and the arts,” Desgrosseilliers said. 

Brian Wilson and Sara Tardif had a table for their business, Detritus Designs, filled with unusual lighting: an old, electric fence control box turned into a lamp, a stack of seven books turned into a lamp and lampshades made from chopped maps.

“We get inspired by the materials,” Wilson said.

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Sheryl Westleigh of Bryant Pond had a table with lots of octopus-inspired jewelry and sat nearby sculpting. She said she liked the maker faire for the interaction.

“Usually, it’s just me selling my artwork and I don’t really get to talk shop,” she said.

Westleigh also displayed what she called “cell culture necklaces,” designs inside actual 35-mm petri dishes. People asked whether there were real germs in there. Nope; all art.

“(Once) a microbiology professor bought five or six of them to give to his students,” she said. “I love when something like that happens.”

kskelton@sunjournal.com


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