Now open: The Commoners' Workshop!
Hey all, going to be a short newsletter this week because all my energy right now is going into setting up our new workshop space! As I mentioned in last week's newsletter, the cabin next to ours at the Market as been vacant this year, and the City is letting us turn it into a community crafting space! We did a "soft open" last week with nothing but some folding tables and some chairs, and it worked out great. This week I'm hoping to get some shelves set up for materials storage, and some pegboard to allow visiting artists and crafters to sell their wares. But to get all that done by Saturday, I had to slack off on the newsletter a bit 😂 So here's some quick news to tide you over, and I hope to see you at the Market on Saturday.
Recycling Updates
We finished another big step in the computer recycling project this week when we took a bunch of non-ferrous metals down to Padnos recycling in Muskegon. Between the aluminum, copper, miscellaneous wires, and low-grade circuit boards, we had almost 90lbs of recyclable materials, and we were pleasantly surprised to get $52 back for our trouble.
If you've got an old computer sitting around that you've been meaning to get rid of, consider donating it to our Computers for the Commons program! You can watch us disassemble your hard drive and run magnets over the platters so that you know for sure that your data has been safely destroyed. Then we'll disassemble the rest of the computer, reuse what we can, and make sure that the other parts get recycled as effectively as possible. All recycling proceeds go to benefit our programs, and each computer we take apart gets Montague Commoners $10-$20 closer to actually paying its own bills 😂
Workshop details
Right now the workshop is still pretty barebones, but it's already an improvement on being outside at the picnic table. We'll be fitting it out more thoroughly over the next couple of weeks.
Once it's set up, the plan is start having more "open workshop" hours throughout the week for anyone who wants to come hang out and work on projects, get some tech support, or learn a new skill. We'll also be hosting some special work days for things like screenprinting tshirts that are a little too involved to do during the Market.
Recommendation Corner
This is a repeat of a recommendation I gave a couple of months ago, but I'm bringing it back for the Pride Month movie marathon because we've gotten a couple dozen new subscribers since then, and apparently some of our ongoing subscribers failed to immediately obey me last time I told you to watch it 😂
It's less than 20 minutes long, and it will break your heart in the sweetest way imaginable.
This Week's Nails Tokens!
Didn't do my nails this week, so instead I'm sharing the latest round of Hour tokens that I've been varnishing. There are at least eight different artists represented here, with ages from 5 to 70+! It's so fun to see the ideas that everyone comes up with, and I love seeing the community get behind the idea. You can earn your choice of tokens by joining in on a project down at the Workshop, and you can pick up blank tokens to paint at our shop, Montague City Hall, or the Nuveen Art Center.
Enjoy the good weather this weekend, and if I don't see you around town I'll see you back here next week.
Pre-meme-ium Content
Now that we've got a few people supporting us with premium subscriptions, we wanted to find a way to thank our supporters without putting anything useful behind a paywall. So I've started tacking on a couple of memes to the end of each newsletter! If the paywall feature is working, free subscribers will see one meme below, while paid subscribers will get to see all five. If you're living on less than $35k/year, please do not give us money. Just let us know and we'll hook you up with the memes for free.
