Endless Pastabilities Contents

When Mike Benner came to our most recent workshop in November, his outgoing personality immediately came through. We all recognized his name from social media, and conversation came easily. Once we started the tour, he began asking a lot of questions we don’t often hear...

“How many kgs can one line make in a day?”

“What’s the operating cost of one of those lines? Like, for a full day?”

“What does it cost to build a line like that? Do you sell the plans?”

Most people want to know where we get our color inspiration from, or where we source our materials. Not Mike. He was all business, and we quickly learned why.

Mike and his wife, Shey, own a cookie cutter company out of AZ. After years in the decorating industry, Shey got to be one of the best, and this meant lots of orders and LOTS of late nights trying to fulfill those orders. One late night, while baking cookies at 2am, Mike had a suggestion: why not combine their passions to form one business? Shey brought her love of cookies and design, Mike brought his love of computer programming and 3d printing, and BOOM. SheyB Designs was born!

While all this background unfurled at the workshop, it became clear that Mike was looking to feed his printers a massive quantity of plastic. No wonder he wanted to know our limits! Over the past few months, we’ve built a relationship with Mike and Shey. They’ve developed a custom color, Glitter’s Mane, to represent their brand, with plans to come out and design more (once we get through this pandemic :-/; more on that next month). 

For this month’s box, Mike has offered up his signature color for you all to enjoy, and though the name has glitter in it, Glitter's Mane has a subtle pearl finer than human hair for texture and shimmer. Complementing this fine silver pearl is highly diluted color concentrates for a precise result, but not without plenty of hard work. A perfect expression of Mike and Shey.

This finish stands out as a perfect base for additional complimentary colors so in creating this months two other colors, Alex started working with other dilute color concentrates. It's fascinating what just 0.01% color can do and when working at a fraction of that how you can subtly shift one color with 0.002% of another. At this level of dilution the color of your base resin can contribute. It's wild but a more yellow grade of PLA could shift a blue to green, but we're in the details so we've started with a very neutral, non-yellow HTPLA base.

Anyway, this lovely, cool gradient would look great as some cookie cutters, don’t you think? We all recognize these times are hard, and we hope these colors will help make the best of your new “normal.”

Be well, Pasta family, and stay safe