Baby Back Ribs

The name says it all.

In my CT+E Play to Make class we were assigned a project where we had to design something using additive manufacturing.

Additive manufacturing is creating something one layer at a time. A common example of this is something like 3D printing. Now for this assignment, I wanted to be creative, I wanted to make something that's different.

When figuring out what to use for my supplies, my friend was also shopping for supplies for Marti Gras. Now he was making a King Cake, which means that you need to have a baby inside of it. A tiny plastic one of course. When you buy them online, you can really only by them in packs of like 30... or 300. And it just so happened that my friend accidentally bought the 300 one. Once we got them I knew, these were going to be the materials that I was going to use.

My first attempt did not go well at all. Since plastic babies and hot glue are really hard to use as building materials (go figures), they really could only be attached at the head and have them stacked on one another. I wanted to bend them and make a ball or something that I would be able to hang from the ceiling and just have it be a decoration. But after around three hours of trying, they just couldn't keep a rounded shape.

After the failure of my first attempt I had some friends come over and help me, since they are a little bit better with hot glue than I am. Now, at first they were a little horrified by the tiny babies, but eventually they simply just accepted it and decided that this was normal for me. Which I don't know what that says about me, but it can't be good.

We first decided to just think of puns that we could use for the name. We came up with names like the Baby Blade, where we would make a sword out of them, but we ultimately ended with Baby Back Ribs. Once we heard that name, we all bursted out laughing and immediately started getting to work.

We did it by making circles of all the babies by gluing all their heads together. This ended up being the spine, mainly because it was just incredibly sturdy, like really sturdy. We then took the sticks of babies that we had, which were made by attaching the babies' heads to the butts of the other ones. I called it the Human Centipede Method, which I thought was hilarious, but sadly my friends found it pretty gross. These put together made up the back and ribs. But I didn't want to stop there, I wanted to make the whole person, so that is exactly what I did. I made arms, legs, feet, eyes, and a mouth using smaller baby sticks that we made. In the end, we created Seth, The Baby Back Ribs Man.

Overall, the project went really well actually. I had some of the most fun I've ever had making something and it definitely was unique, which as you know, was my goal. I still have around 100 babies left, so if you have any ideas on what I should make next, feel free to reach out to me.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you have an amazing day. And thank you for existing!