Brant, the President of Milwaukee Makerspace, has a great saying:
“Perhaps we should solve it as all great problems are solved. With a sign.”
I don’t know if there was a problem, but I made a sign anyway.
I started with this IKEA lamp known as the “Skugga” which I picked up at the Z2 Rummage Sale for 2 bucks…
But there is a bug in this sign! It seems to promote coffee, and I don’t drink coffee. That’s an easy one to fix, because… hackerspace.
I grabbed a copy of the (new!) Milwaukee Makerspace logo (thanks, Mike!) and did a bit of editing, and loaded it into the Silhouette Studio software so I could cut some vinyl.
Luckily the coffee thing has a white piece of plastic behind it that will work perfectly for us… All we need to do is stick the vinyl to it.
The logo has some nice stitching around it, which can be troublesome when used at smaller sizes, and while some got pulled out of place during the cutting, it didn’t matter for this application since we were using the reverse. (If I’d wanted the positive, this would have been messy!)
I used masking tape to pull up many of the tiny pieces. For the rest I used a sharp new X-ACTO knife. (I also stuck it right into my finger, because I miss being an undergrad in Graphic Design.)
I didn’t notice until later that I lost part of the “m”… oops! Well, vinyl can be that way sometimes. I could always cut a new “m” piece in the future.
Here’s our finished light-up sign, which now resides at Milwaukee Makerspace. I think I should have made the vinyl just a little bit smaller, but hey, it looks pretty good for a late-night, rush-job project.