bbaldoni

We all know how expensive weddings can be right? Well, recently several patrons have been using Erlanger’s STREAM Center to save themselves money on their weddings. One of my coworkers recently got married and used the STREAM Center to save a ton of money. We have three pieces of equipment that are especially great for weddings. We have our laser cutter and engravers which can be used to engrave wedding party gifts or even cut out center piece displays.  “We were able to buy 2’x2’ ¼ inch cherry plywood at Home Depot for just $9 and they even cut it down to pieces that would fit into the Glowforge for us. Once the numbers were cut, we used cherry stain that my dad already had in his basement, then hot-glued them onto thin metal rods. They looked great with the cherry wood centerpieces we made, and cost a fraction of comparable table numbers!”   Our Poster printer is also a huge money saver for all those large printing needs that seem to pop up during the big day. Our poster printer can print large oversized posters from .jpg, .png, or .pdf files as long as they are high quality. An average poster of 24” x 36” size will only cost you $7.00!  “With a $6 frame and a $7 poster made on the STREAM poster printer, we were able to have a custom seating chart for just $13. And we were able to reuse the frame later!”  The Silhouette Cameo is also great for creating decals that need to be placed on a pre-existing material. We can use regular vinyl for mugs or tumblers and heat transfer vinyl for shirts and totes.   “For my wedding party gifts, I found four-packs of stemless wine glasses at Target for $3.99, designed the [...]

Recently I picked up a new hobby on the weekend that most folks have probably heard of. That hobby would be Dungeons and Dragons. Now I know there are a lot of people who are probably thinking “This guy is just a super nerd so of course he enjoys D&D”. You’re not wrong about the nerd part but for several years I drew the line at D&D because I thought that was “too” nerdy. I was encouraged to give it a try by a friend and I loved it! Since then I have been trying to find fun and cool ways to spice up our gaming table with all sorts of accessories. As most folks know we opened our STREAM Center in January and it was a maker’s paradise. There is so much potential for tabletop gamers to save money and yet still have cool and interesting pieces for their games. My favorite pieces of equipment to use are the Glowforge laser cutter and our two 3D printers. With them I’ve made custom miniatures, dice cases and rollers, coasters for our group and so much more. I’ve even printed a custom terrain board for our group on our poster printer. I have also hosted a program where people could sew their own dice bags using our sewing machines. These things are all done at cost, so they are extremely cheap. I can print an average sized miniature for a character for about $1.50 or less. I 3D printed my friend a tabaxi miniature for 90¢. I made 2 dice tower rollers with $16.00 worth of acrylic from Amazon. The sheets I bought already had a protective film on them, but even if I had bought [...]