I have a bit of news for you that many of your readers should love: people can now easily make 3D printouts of their Minecraft models. I wrote a free, open-source program called Mineways that helps them, the website (with photos of some results) is here. The key thing is: you don't need a 3D printer, you can easily upload your model to a 3D print firm. It's also surprisingly cheap for smaller models, e.g. $7.50 for a 2-inch-tall piece of pixel art. For more examples of models that have been printed, see the Flickr pool.

Large models can be expensive, but the pixel-art makers in particular should find their creations affordable. For example, I grabbed the model from this site and put it up for sale here (at no profit to me - this was just an experiment). It's easy to do, especially for pixel art (which has no weird geometry problems, usually), just see the tutorials on my site.

Anyway, of all the Minecrafters out there, I think people making schematics have both the strong interest and knowledge & skills to best take advantage of 3D printing.

Let me know if you have any questions, and I hope you can pass on the word. I'm not making any money on this project, it's just a fun thing to do (just like Minecraft).

Eric