Category Archives: Crafts

Crafty little stars!

3Dprinting, Crafts, , ,

My friend, Tracy Herman runs a local drop in crafting space (Knot and Purl) and she was running out of little stars that a friend had given her years ago. They were very popular with the kids to glue onto their projects. I eventually located a supplier but they were over $.01 each! So I designed my own and printed it. I’ve printed thousands by now, and she likes them better than the old ones because they are flat on the back and easier to glue.

The Original Star

I chose to make them in FreeCAD, but FreeCAD doesn’t have a “draw star” function. I could have laboriously drawn and constrained a star, but Inkscape does have a Draw Star function.
I then imported my inkscape drawing (SVG) into FreeCAD’s Draft workbench, and then converted it to a sketch.

I was then able to extrude it (pad function) and then fillet the edges

It takes about 2 hours and 45 minutes to print 81 of them on the Bambu X1 Carbon. I printed them in gold and RGB coextruded silk filament.

You can find the STL at Printables and Makerworld. You can find the source files on my github

Holiday Ornament Design Challenge

3Dprinting, Crafts, FamilyFun, Holiday

Over the Holiday break, I challenged my family to design some ornaments for our tree. So far, only Mason (17 year old son) rose to the challenge, and I think he did very well indeed.

He did the designs in OpenSCAD, and at first hardcoded all the measurements until I encouraged him to make the designs fully parametric. This piece was designed to accept a light (from the string lights on the tree) in the bottom. Printed in Natural PLA with about 15% fill, giving it a kindof stripey, plaid texture.

This was printed without support on the Ultimaker 3. The very inside top is a little stringy, but hardly noticeable, and very easy to clean up.

The second design was really the first one he did, and isn’t fully parametric. You’ll have to scale it in your slicer, but it turned out pretty nice.

I printed it in white, thinking it might be fun to use a sharpie to color in the facets. This was printed with the PVA support.
I also printed it in transparent ColorFabb XT. I had a problem with the wipe tower, so the top was a bit messed up with mixed PVA and XT, which broke off, but a light fit into it, and I think it looks nice.

I encourage you to sit down and design with your family this holiday. You can get the sources for these at: http://github.com/osbock/HolidayOrnaments. Feel free to do some Pull requests to add your own designs!

For younger, or less mathematically inclined designers, I recommend Tinkercad.com, or I’m sure there are cool Ipad apps out there. Let me know if you have a favorite!