#MakerMonday | Throwies

To throwie or not to throwie!

Spoiler: The answer is always to throwie. Throwies are fun, easy to make by yourself or in a group, and don’t require much to create a great effect. The elements of a throwie are pretty simple: a battery, a diffused LED, a magnet and some tape. Putting all the pieces together is not only fun but educational. Once everything is together and working the adventure begins. The essence of a throwie is exactly as it sounds, you have to throw the light onto a metal object, thus “throwie”. It may take a few tries but they’ll eventually stick if you follow the throwie recipe.

So what’s so great about a throwie on a piece of metal?  What if you have 10 different colored lights or 200, like we had in our own wedding? The effect produced is pretty amazing. The life expectancy of these lights is roughly 2 weeks, but in our experience most of our lights were still working at two months and even at a year old there were a handful of lights that still had some life in them. The LED life expectancy is quite a bit longer than the battery so if you can retrieve the throwie after they go dim you can replace the battery and have a brand new working throwie once again. If you haven’t heard of or about throwies before, check out this instructable on the topic. There are some pretty bare metal bridges around San Antonio that are just begging for some color… What would you do with them?

Here’s some inspiration:
http://goo.gl/wPPg9u
http://goo.gl/4pTWGh
http://goo.gl/IkzsPI
http://goo.gl/BVToxN