Alcohol Inked 3d Printed Pendant


Hubby and I got a 3d printer. It's been a couple of weeks of bed leveling and a failed attempt at Benchy (the little boat that's often used as a benchmark print to make sure everything is working).


We've both learned quite a lot about how fussy these printers can be. Hubby was getting very frustrated but ended up ordering better springs and flipping our glass print plate over and then everything started working much better. We got our little boat printed and a little pop top pry bar and a playing card tray and we were feeling pretty good about ourselves.


So, it was time to print something for the blog! We started printing these adorable leaf earrings. I don't wear earrings, but these were large statement earrings, so I figured these would be perfect to turn into some kind of necklace. It's only like our 4th project on the new printer and certainly the most detailed and tiny print job yet, so what could go wrong? Our first attempt got a bit tangled up in the outline...we almost left it going, but decided to start again.


The 2nd print was a catastrophic tangle up--didn't get a picture. 3rd attempt and it was finally running fairly smoothly and just a short way into the print, the filament snapped. These earrings don't take much filament, but it only made it about half way through the print job, and we were unable to get the filament plugged back in while it was printing.

We had another tangle up before it finally printed both leaves mostly clean.


So I was left with two completed leaves and one that printed halfway (the other one was mangled when we tried to stop the printer to reload the filament--it didn't work).



The plan was to see if alcohol ink worked on the plastic used in the 3d printer.


So I got out my craft mat and a stamper and a selection of alcohol inks.


I decided to do a sort of rainbow ombre effect on the leaf starting with green. It stamped on fairly well, but it was a bit more textured than I expected. I tried using a foam brush and a regular paintbrush to fine tune the colors, but nothing worked as well as the felt applicator stamp.


After I got the inks on the leaf, I came back and did some stamping to get the colors to blend into each other a bit better. It actually looks a little less blotchy in person than it turned out in the photos, but the texture of the print is something that I'll have to figure in for future projects.


Next up I thought I'd give a metallic effect to the other fully printed leaf. I grabbed a gray ink and a couple of silver inks.


After I got a layer of gray ink on the leaf, I got out the Pixiss silver ink and decided to a base coat with it since it's a lot cheaper than other metallic inks, and I figured it would be thinner (as the other pixiss inks are). Then tragedy happened. I opened up the ink for the first time and the nozzle was clogged. I squeezed a bit harder thinking it might splurt out onto the craft mat, but that's what it's there for...I was very wrong. It splattered with explosive force. I got silver speckles all over the table, my shirt, my arms, my watch, my cell phone, my face, my glasses....you get the picture. It was not pretty. So the next 30 minutes was spent cleaning speckles of silver off of everything. Fortunately, rubbing alcohol got most of it up, but I'll probably be finding speckles of silver for years.


After it was mostly cleaned up, I did stamp the two remaining leaves with silver.They kind of need something else, and I may come back with another color later, but for now, they are silver, darn it...just like everything else at my kitchen table.


After the leaves had about an hour to dry, and I had finally mostly recovered from the splatter incident, I sprayed them with some Kamar Varnish and left them outside to dry. Then I forgot about them for a couple of hours before spraying them with some Krylon Clear Glaze.


After they were dry, I attached a couple of jump rings to the leaves so I could turn them into pendants. I stacked the half-printed silver leaf with the rainbow leaf to create a layered look. I think I'll maybe add more ink to the plain silver leaf, but for now, it's been made into a lovely silver necklace (though I may never use silver again).


I strung them up with some faux suede cord and even though this was kind of a painful project, I think they turned out pretty well, and I'm excited for more 3d printer projects!

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