Much like the rest of us, Matt Martini felt like he never had the time or resources to work on his kitchen utensils. “I wanted to organize my utensil drawer. All the silverware was a mess.”

Matt is a Cornell graduate with a degree in engineering and currently a student at the School of Professional Development at Stony Brook University. With the iCREATE spaces, he was able to work on a kitchen utensil holder using the paper cutter, and laser cutter.

Matt heard about the Innovation Lab through David Ecker, the director of iCREATE at one of their DoIT staff events. He started on the project about two months ago, working on it in his spare time in brief several hour intervals. He says he spent maybe up to a total of eight hours on the entire holder so far, and it is almost at its final step. The utensil holder functions like a tray and has each of the utensils stacked on it.

To produce his utensil holder, Matt photographed each of the utensils with measurements to get an accurate image of the size and shape of each one, which he manipulated and clarified on Adobe Photoshop to mark the outlines. This design was then moved to the paper cutter. Then, he experimented with using the Innovation Lab’s paper cutter to make two prototypes before he moved on to the laser cutter, which he is considering testing with foam first.

Above: An example of the images he took of each utensil with a measurement.

Above: One of his PSD (photoshop file) templates for how the utensil holder will look.

His end result is going to be a wooden holder that will be positioned and designed exactly the way he wants.

Above: The paper prototype with the utensils laid out on it.

Matt said, “I had this project in my head from way back, but I never had the equipment possible.”