A head-and-shoulders illustration of Gloria. She has light skin, shoulder-length black hair and is wearing a light green shirt and several necklaces.

[liveblog] gingerbread stata by Gloria Z. '26

we are building stata out of gingerbread

[10:49am]

It’s bad ideas weekend! We’re building the Stata center out of gingerbread today and Teresa is also here. Much of yesterday was spent baking 15 sheets of gingerbread, each 12″x18″ (hopefully that’s enough stock material). We will be laser cutting and gluing (with frosting) and not eating the carcinogenic unflavored gingerbread :-D.

a picture of the stata center at mit

the stata center

a pov picture of someone holding a cardboard box with a lot of gingerbread in it

transporting the gingerbread sheets to n52 (makerspace where we’re doing this)

[11:40am]

the event technically starts at 12pm, so i’m just getting everything prepped (setting out trays and putting down paper etc.). also here’s a cute little sign! kind of reads as “gingorbread” though.

picture of a piece of gingerbread with "gingerbread stata" cut out of it

little sign to test out the brackets (below) and rice-paper-behind-cutout technique

picture of a laser cutter cutting shapes out of gingerbread

laser cutting right angle brackets for holding things up

[1:30pm]

we’ve made our game plan and our first building! some unexpected problems: the variable thickness of the gingerbread means that the laser doesn’t always cut all the way through, and the brackets don’t always fit on certain parts of our cut pieces. but so far the frosting is holding up pretty well, and we’ve also got two pieces of foam acting as supports for the elevated base of the building :-).

a gingerbread base and building on top

the base and our first building chunk on the right

a drawing on brown kraft paper

our plan (but tbh we’re probably only going to do half of these buildings / focus on the front-facing parts)