The New Hobbyist

Well I’m doing it, I’m getting married this month. We’ve picked a brewery as our venue and unsurprisingly I’ve decided I want to make as many things myself as possible for the event. One of the things I picked to create was the boutonnieres for myself and my groomsmen.

Since the wedding was at a brewery I thought it would be fun to carry the theme into the boutonnieres and make them look like ethanol molecules. I found a 3D rendering of the molocule on Wikipedia which looked nice enough. After rotating and spacing out the parts so it looked more visually pleasing the only problem was modeling.

I primarily use Google Sketchup for modeling but it’s really not great for organic modeling (or at least I’m not any good at it). I ended up using Tinkercad to model this. It’s a great web based solid modeler that makes creating printable objects a breeze. The model is available on Tinkercad as well as uploaded to Thingiverse (Tinkercad exports directly to Thingiverse, how cool is that?)

I loaded these up on my Makerbot and ran off a batch of 10 boutonnieres. Because I modeled them to print without support material they only took about 15 minutes each to print. The lack of support material also meant there was virtually no clean up needed on the part after printing. After I had my 10 boutonnieres printed I used some superglue to attach pinbacks to each one and they were ready to go!

[thingiverse thing=33623]

When my fiance Melissa and I started planning our wedding last September we knew it wasn’t going to be cookie cutter. We decided to include some personal additions that we just couldn’t get elsewhere to make the day our own and at the same time save money.  

Here’s one example. Instead of buying bouquets for the wedding we decided to use our combined talents to create something that was not only skirted the norm but would also last quite a long time. We combined 3D printed parts from my Makerbot and crocheted flowers to create a rather unique bouquet for the bridesmaids.

The crochet pattern was found on allcrafts.net HERE. After a couple of trial runs (one of which she was pretty unhappy with because she rolled it WAY too tightly) each flower only took about 15 minutes to make. 

For the 3D printed parts I was inspired by “Rose” by JoeyE on Thingiverse. While this wasn’t exactly what I was looking for it was a good jumping off point in figuring out how to design something that looked both organic and digital.

In the gallery below you’ll find the original prints as well as my painting process. I used white Rustoleum Universal which does a great job covering printed ABS parts. It gave it a nice off white color.

Once all the flowers were done Melissa took over the project again. She covered bouquet forms we picked up at our local crafts store with suiting material from my Mom, wrapped the handle in the grey yarn from the flowers, and finally arranged the flowers on the form. Using hot glue to secure everything to the form made this last step fly by.

I’ve uploaded the flower files to Thingiverse for printing for Valentines Day, birthdays, anniversarys, and who knows maybe even other Maker weddings. Next up? Groomsmen Boutonnieres!

[thingiverse thing=33410]