TAP lab

09/10/2026

Our Inventors Guild school holiday kids have been very busy this week! Lots of tech combined with arts and crafts!

It could take a while for the lab to recover from the glitter explosion that occurred on the last day. 😂 ✨✨✨

06/10/2026

Parkrun patches made as a gift!✨

These are particularly clever because the embroidery design wasn’t made using the usual “trace over a picture” method. The image was created by taking the map data and somehow transforming it through a coding process into instructions for the embroidery machine. 💻➡️🧵✨

05/10/2026

Tuesday Open Maker session starts late this week. Come in from 3.30pm - 9pm (it's a later start than normal because we are running a school holiday programme that finishes at 3pm)

Send a message to learn more

03/10/2026

Laser cut cake topper, made for a fan of Exploding Kittens. 💥🐱
This mischievous cat has knocked over the candles, broken the happy birthday sign and plonked itself right in the middle of the cake.

01/10/2026

🚀 One of the awesome creations from Inventors Guild last term! ✨
It's an LED tea light holder (if you follow us you might recognise it as an idea Mike came up with and trialled a month or so ago).

We’ve got a few places left in our Inventors Guild school holiday programme next week if your kid is looking for something creative to do.
https://events.humanitix.com/october-26-school-holidays-inventors-guild

29/09/2026

Check out these very cute button decoration thingies - no one quite knows what to call them 😂.

They’re made on the embroidery machine, then cut out with a small slit so they can slip over the buttons on an existing outfit. So many design possibilities! ✨

25/09/2026

🎨✨ Mike has been experimenting with using the vinyl cutter to draw images!
He took an old painting of his, ran it through dithering software, then exported it as an SVG for the vinyl cutter to draw. Confused about how the vinyl cutter is drawing? He swapped the blade for a pen!

23/09/2026

Very impressive embroidery from a very talented young maker! 🌸🧵
She found a beautiful picture of cherry blossoms online and learned the basics of manual digitisation to come up with this embroidery. ✨

18/09/2026

We have 3 days of Inventors Guild coming up in week 2! Book now at https://taplab.nz/holiday

16/09/2026

Donna has done TAP lab's first sock embroidery! 🧦✨
A little bit of joy and personalisation to celebrate Te Wiki o te Reo Māori.