So you want to give a gift to someone or to yourself. You want to indulge with something creative & unique? As of today and until the 5th of July you can make Sterling Silver Ringpoems and Cufflinks.

The Silver used is Sterling silver that is 92.5% pure silver. The entire model is made up of Silver so your words will be too! You can check out how it works or make one yourself here. 

The Sterling Silver Ringpoems cost $129 & the Sterling Silver Cufflinks cost $99 including shipping. It will take us 15 working day to deliver them to you.  

The process is wax 3D printing plus the lost wax process(investment casing to be more precise). The wax 3D prints of your designs are used for a mould and then molten silver is poured in to make your custom made Ringpoem or Cufflink. There are some more details on how that works here also.

Update: watch the movie for a 1 minute to see what this is all about:

If you're not familiar with QR codes they are basically a new form of bar code. With any camera phone and the right software you can take a picture of the QR code and it will take you to a website for example. You can try it now with the QR code above and one of these tools.

QR codes were supposed to be the next big thing: a bridge between the real world and the web. You could put the codes anywhere and people could then save the information on their phones for later or find out more about a building, a t-shirt at that moment. Like human tetris and tentacles QR codes are currently only really mainstream in Japan though. 

FluidForms a while back made a QR code Belt buckle and inspired by them we decided to do something QR codes too.

I made a 3D printed QR code stamp, now I can stamp anywhere and people can take a photograph of the stamp and will then be directed to my website.

Here's how I did it:

1. I went to a QR code generator, typed in the URL and got my QR code.

2. I opened the saved image in the Gimp and flipped it to horizontal(under image-transform).

3. Uploaded it to the Shapeways Stampmaker, ticked the for use with light box and ordered it for $25.

4. Shapeways 3D prints the stamp and ten days later I get it, and now I can stamp my QR code anywhere.

The whole thing took me 10 minutes.

This is what you get from Shapeways, a 3D printed flexible stamp sheet, 9 by 13cm. We also give you a small acrylic block to use as a back for the stamp, the stamp sticks to the block but you can remove it and exchange it for other stamps if you want.

You also will need stamp ink pad. You can use any ink you like. I made my QR code very large, so I needed to use a bigger block than the one I got for free but you could just make smaller QR codes and place lots of them on the image that is to be Stampmaker-ed.

Here's how the scanning of the stamp works:

Arno has a Nokia E71 and it has barcode tool on the phone as standard(menu-tools-barcode). He could read my stamps virtually all the time on lots of different surfaces. Here is a list of Nokia phones that come standard with the Nokia barcode reader. The page also shows you where you can download other readers for any other smartphones for free. I downloaded QR Reader for the Iphone and paid a buck for it, I was not as lucky with that tool as it only worked rarely.

ProTip: you do in all cases have to apply pressure slowly but surely and be careful not to move the stamp sideways while stamping. If you have a lot of light areas or gaps in the resulting stamp then it will not work. Some porous & uneven surfaces are hard to do. Smooth concrete works fine, uneven concrete is hard. Steel girders, smooth walls, painted walls, painted floors, tile, board, tables, plastic, paper all work well. Enjoy.

Although we'd really like for you guys to try this out, please be aware that we only advocate using the Shapeways Stampmaker to stamp your own property, and accept no liability la di da da etc..

MaxSmoke had a great and funny "nosepicker metal minion" model 3D printed in metal. You can read about it on the forum. Hilarious! 

The coolest thing happened this Sunday: we got a Maker Faire Editor's Choice Blue Ribbon. We were busy talking to lots of people and all of a sudden these two attractive women show up with walkie talkies and they hand me a blue ribbon. To be honest I initially did not exactly know what it meant. We were very happy though, but only when we figured out what it was and how it works were we really overwhelmed. The Maker Faire Blue Ribbons are handed out by the editors of both Make Magazine and Craft Magazine. They hand out a lot of them in total but with all this awesomness out there it was really great to get one. If you walk through the halls and see all the assembled ideas, technology and cumulative effort it is mindblowing.

One of the coolest things I saw was iFixit. This is a service from a bunch of knowledgeable repair guys on how to fix things. Their website has guides on how to repair items and you can purchase parts from them. At Maker Faire they had a front end of a car and a washing machine and they were continually dispensing advice. A great idea. 

Gyrobike was a bike font well that contains a gyroscope. That way even though the wheel is by itself, it will stay upright. They want install them in kids bikes so that kids can learn to ride bikes without training wheels. I am not sure about the use case but thought it was a really nifty idea. 

There were other bicycle innovations such Conceptulight's Big Kids Bike "the kitten." This 250 pound monster of a bike looked great and actually worked too.

Another thing, you have no idea how nice everyone is at the Maker Faire. They must spray people with lithium as they enter because everyone is so friendly. Testimony to that: Posables, posable wooden statues that people were asked to play with. No rude poses what so ever, incredible. I'll put up more stuff as soon as I get the time.