Tagged: Thingiverse
Faberge eggs have been a source of delight and intrigue since the first one was created for Czar Alexander’s wife in 1815. Each of these spectacular Easter gifts housed hidden surprises ranging from bejewelled miniature replicas to a singing bird in a gilded cage.
Inspired by the Faberge legacy we are running a competition to find the most inspiring and surprising 3D printed Easter egg. Like Faberge, you have complete freedom in the design of your egg, with the only prerequisite being that there has to be surprise within each creation. You can design your egg from scratch or re-mix existing designs or simply hunt though Thingiverse for the most crazy/brilliant/lovely thing to put in an egg. We don’t mind.
Two prizes are up for grabs: (1) Best Technical Interpretation, and (2) Most Creative Interpretation. Each winner gets £50 to spend on Faberdashery filament and big love from us! To enter, simply upload your design to Thingiverse with the tags ‘Faberdashery’ and ‘Faberge’ by 12:00 GMT Tuesday 2nd April, so get your wiggle on! We will announce the winners on Friday 5th.
Legal stuff: The prize is non-transferable and cannot be redeemed for a cash sum. Vouchers will be provided which can be used to purchase Faberdashery filament through the Faberdashery website store to the sum of £50. Vouchers must be spent in a single transaction and cannot be redeemed across a series of separate purchases. Vouchers are valid for a year from the date of issue.
Credit: Design- Customizable Easter Artistic Eggs by Joe Stubbs.
Here’s a beautiful story.
Simon and Steph got married this summer. They wanted to make their wedding favours really personal to them. What better way to do this than by 3D printing them!
We’ll let them explain it in their own words:
We have been playing with the printers for around a year and were impressed with the capability and versatility of them. When we were looking into the cost of favour boxes they turned out to be pretty expensive and with the cost of everything else we decided to try and make our own. We found the design of the box on Thingiverse and sweets to go inside that we had personalised with our names and dates of the wedding to make them unique. Our past experiences with white had either come out slightly see-through or with a yellowy tinge. The Faberdashery Arctic White seemed like a perfect option. It was completely pure and exactly what we wanted-matching perfectly with the brilliant white decor. At the wedding lots of the guest said they were amazing and asked where we had got the boxes from – they were completely in awe when we said we had made them! We would just like to thank you for allowing us to have this extra wow factor on our special day!
Simon and Steph
As you can see, the results were stunning. Thanks Simon and Steph for sharing your story with us.
Something we love about PLA for 3d printing, is its translucency. PLA pure and natural is semi-transparent, with a gorgeous crystalline effect. It produces stunning 3d prints that other materials can’t achieve. Here are some shining examples!
Sim City Capitol Ambient Light model by TopperDEL
A project that came onto our radar recently is the Sim City Capitol Ambient Light model by TopperDEL which takes the Capitol Building on Thingiverse from Skimbal’s Sim City 2000 Tabletop Play Set and turns it into a stunning colour-shifting tabletop lamp. TopperDEL used colour changing LEDs to create ambient light change effects and printed the model in Faberdashery Crystal Clear PLA. The outcome is a real design centrepiece. He’s included detailed instructions on how he printed his Capitol Building, focussing especially on the challenge of hollow printing. TopperDEL says he has plans to make more LED lamps. We’ll be watching out with excitement for his next cool idea.
Grayscale Dualstrusion Poster by tbuser
The other fantastic project that plays with transparent qualities is the Grayscale Dualstrusion Poster by Thingiverse superstar tbuser. His design experiments with the variation in transparency according to print thickness. He created this iconic poster through simple layering. Genius!
3D printing Surface Treatments – PLA iPhone Case by norcalbarney
Of course we couldn’t blog about PLA translucency experiments without mentioning norcalbarney‘s magnificent iphone cases. What can we say? Exceptional use of the Hilbert Curve!
At Faberdashery we’ve just launched our new and improved Jade Green. This completes our current collection of translucent PLA colours. So whether you’re thinking light-up bunnies, awesome self-portraits, mojioto green shot glasses or just some simple jewellery then reach for the translucents.
It’s Friday, and we wanted to share a little inspiration with you. Here’s some of the cool stuff people have been doing with Faberdashery filament this week ~
Angry Birds by MotoBarsteward.
Parametric Rings by Yuleblinker.
Blockbot by Richard Gain and a great little video to go with it.
Happy Friday all!
Our Thingsmith interviews spotlight the designer/makers that are playing an important role in the 3D printing revolution. In this series we hope to explore what motivates and inspires some of our favorite Thingsmiths.
Richard Horne (RichRap) has established himself as a stalwart of the RepRap community. He is well-known on Thingiverse for his fantastic experimental prints and willingness to take on big printing challenges. An expert in the art of multi-coloured printing, Richard has produced some iconic pieces including the fantastic striped Stegosaurus – sliced. Richard continues to push the boundaries of 3D printing with his most recent experiments into edible prints and ceramics.
1. Tell us about the creation you are most proud of and what inspired it?
My simple filament joiner and layer selective coloured printing. I was clearing out some old things from my childhood and found my old scraperfoils. I really loved these, you carve away the black surface guidelines to expose a chalk image giving you a picture and a somewhat rudimentary textured 3D effect. I then used pen inks on the chalk to make my birds, lions etc. come to life with colour. When I found these old images, I made a link with the plain coloured 3D prints I had seen and thought about adding colour using layers to make them more interesting, I then had to spend 6 months building my RepStrap before I could try it out.
2. When you embark on a new project, what’s your approach and what are your favorite tools?
I tend to evolve ideas and designs as I work on them; I’m not a fan of planning and designing everything before starting something practical, I like to see what influences me and experiment. I’m also a big fan of simple paper pads – I make so many notes and sketches and have lots of them for all sorts of jobs and projects, from home DIY to 3D printing, and more recently my love of blogging continues to compliment my note pads that I use every day. And of course my very favorite tool is now my 3D printer!
3. There’s an amazing community of makers out there; who’s work has recently impressed you?
MendelMax caught my eye recently as a great machine evolution and I’m always impressed by sculpture and organic models, but what really impresses me the most, is the many wonderfully talented people out there doing amazing designs and projects together. One person I really want to thank is Chris Palmer (AKA - Nophead) if it was not for his blog and his ongoing amazing journey I may not have taken the plunge into RepRap. From the very first entry on his blog I was hooked and also felt exactly the same way as I imagine he must have - “ My friend Wes pointed me to www.reprap.org and I immediately decided it was what I was going to do with part two of my life”.
I’m always delighted to see so many new people every day on the forum and Thingiverse doing amazing things and getting involved, improving and building on this technology so everyone can benefit.
4. Gazing into the future, what’s the next amazing project we should look out for?
Other than a real life star trek replicator I’m fascinated with both the extremely small and very large-scale 3D printing fabrication – from the ultra-fine microscopic layers and extreme high resolution to the really massive, complex impossible looking printed sculptures, houses, bridges etc. it’s going to be amazing watching all this unfold. I would love to be even more involved. I’m looking into food printing at the moment and it will need some community help to make it amazing, it’s much harder than I thought!
5. At Faberdashery Towers we are fuelled by Tea, Earl Grey, Hot. What’s your tinkering tipple of choice?
Normally Vanilla Green Tea and maybe a festive Gingerbread latte or two.
6. Just one last question. As an expert in multicoloured printing we thought it only right to ask what would be your ‘limited edition’ filament colour?
Oh that’s really easy – a complete set of chocolate coloured filaments from creamy white chocolate to 100% Cocoa, it’s my one weakness.
Mmm… That gives us an idea…
Photo credit: RichRap.
This month we’re introducing two new colours and pitching them against each other in an epic battle. On the one side we have Earl Grey, an industrial strength grey worthy of any Robot overlord. On the other side comes Pearly White, an ethereal pearlescent filament made from essence of Unicorn. These titans will go head to head in a battle of fabbing. Can Robot Toy defeat Unicorn Horn? Will the toy robot project succumb to a pink haired unicorn? Is Puzzled Robot a match for Unicorn Logo? In the clash of colours who will come out on top? You decide!
Credits: tekeian, videan42, bryanbrutherford, guru, relet, polymaker
In our last blog post we announced the arrival of Rose, the latest addition to the Faberdashery family. We wanted to create an enduring memento of this special time, but with a Faberdashery twist. This was the perfect opportunity to trial Trimensional.
Trimensional is a nifty iPhone app that turns your phone into a 3d scanner. It works by using both the screen and the front-facing camera on your phone to detect patterns of light reflected off a surface to build a 3D model. To get the best results the scan has to be done in a really dark room with the screen brightness turned up to max. The STL file produced could be sent directly to print, however, we found that a bit of smoothing in Meshlab and cropping in Netfabb Studio gave better results. We shared the files on Thingiverse, and then printed in Faberdashery Buttercream PLA.
Trimensional is a great example of how easy it’s becoming to capture content in 3D from the world around us. We can see a time in the not-too-distant future, when 3d printing these sorts of mementos will be commonplace. What would you scan for your 3D scrap book of memories?
Wow! What a first couple of months it’s been! We’ve shipped filament across the world- from Sydney to Sweden, from New York to the Netherlands, our PLA has travelled to almost every continent. Our materials have been spotted in some awesome places like the Brighton Maker Faire; at the V&A Museum’s new show ‘The Power of Making‘; The DML at Bath’s Innovation Centre and various RepRap meet-ups.
We’ve been amazed by the response from the community and would like to say a massive Thanks! We love the fantastic stuff that you’ve been printing with Faberdashery PLA. Check out the Cups from NYC Designer, RichRap’s Traditional Fan and Heart Box, Smartroad’s fab Dyson hack and Pia Tubert’s elegant pliers. Many thanks to the blogs that also featured us, including Fabbaloo, SolidSmack, Ponoko and others.
Finally, we have had a new addition to the Faberdashery family – Baby Rose. She is bringing a lot of joy to the Faberdashery household – as well as some sleepless nights 
.
So thanks all for your support and fabbing love! We’re currently working on extending our range. Watch this space for more news.
Photo credit: RichRap.
Imagine the scenario – you and your RepRap / Makerbot are washed up on a desert island. Luckily you salvaged a laptop, car battery and a good supply of filament alongside your 3D printer. What do you print to survive? We trawled Thingiverse, for the ultimate .stl files for desert island living.
Shelter from the blazing sun? No problem! Print out the fantastic Dome Connectors by c60 grab some bamboo, and make yourself a geodesic dome. Next get hydrated with a Bottle by aubenc to collect your water, then swig it in style with Joris’ beautifully faceted low res hi quality cup. You may be stuck on a desert island but there’s no need to eat with fingers. Print yourself the essential Sporknife by freakinhuge and chow down on that mango. Finally, attract the attention of passing boats with Zaggo’s classic Whistle.
Of course, some of us would be happily stuck on a desert island with just a 3D printer . So you could always just while away the time with the awesome Chess set I by cbiffle.
What design files would you 3D print to survive?
Featured image by HeyDanielle (Flickr)
