Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

Last week I printed a sorting hat ornament, so when I was trying to decide what to print next, I immediately went looking for other ornaments that I could print with brown filament before I switched to another color. So, with that in mind, I found a cute gingerbread man inspired by Gingy from Shrek.  A gingerbread man was the perfect thing to print on our printer with the brown filament I already had loaded! So I sliced the design using .2 resolution and the recommended 80% infil. Gingy took about an hour to print and turned out so well, that I went ahead and printed a second. Of course, I could have gone to the trouble of pausing the print and finishing the icing with white filament, but I've never done that before, so I wimped out and opted to paint the icing. I tried a few methods which failed miserably (see the messy job above). I tried spreading a thin layer on a paper plate and stamping the ornament. It didn't transfer much paint, so I used a foam paint brush to "...

If you're a regular blog follower, you may know that I have a small Harry Potter tree that I've been creating ornaments for over the years. This year, I stumbled upon a design for a Sorting Hat ornament and immediately knew I needed to print it.   I used the recommended settings for an earlier version of the Sorting Hat (.2 resolution and 25% infil) and used some brown PLA on our 3D Printer . The print took a bit over 2 hours and came out great! After I took a few photos, I immediately hung it up our our tree!

This week I printed a cute design for a reindeer ornament with a nose the perfect size to fit a Lindor Truffle.  I printed the design on our printer using standard resolution (.2) and the recommended 15% infil. I used some matte brown PLA . They took about 50 minutes to print and came out great!   

During the fall Prime Days, there was a sale on Scorch Markers . I saw these online a while back and thought that they looked super cool--you can burn wood without using a wood-burning tool, and since it's a marker, you can use stencils. This is not a sponsored post, I purchased this marker and thought I'd share how it went when I used it for the first time. A few weeks ago, I cut a bunch of designs out of vinyl with my Silhouette Cameo . So far I've made a bunch of signs , but this time I just used a star cut-out as a stencil. You could easily just cut a star out of some sticky shelf liner or contact paper to achieve the same results without needing to own a cutting machine. I applied my vinyl to some wooden ornament blanks  and got out my Scorch Marker. The marker needed to be primed like a paint marker, but after that, it worked really easily. I colored inside the star outline and outside of the star itself to see how the vinyl worked as a stencil and how the marker w...

Earlier this year, I made some Perler bead characters from a kit off of Amazon . Since I've been slowly but surely making ornaments for a small tree themed after Harry Potter , I thought it would be fun to turn the Perler bead characters into ornaments. This is a pretty quick project. On most of the characters, there was a center bead in the top rows of beads. I used a vinyl pick (but an awl or large metal needle should do the trick too) to poke a clean hole through the middle beads. For some characters, there isn't a middle bead, so to keep the ornament hanging mostly straight, I made a new hole between two beads in the middle. This required using a lighter to heat up the metal of the vinyl pick and then to poke a hole. Once the holes were poked, then I added a jump ring (small metal rings that are sold with the jewelry supplies) to the hole and pinched it closed with a pliers. Once the jump rings are added, you can use a cord or thread or, like I did, just an ornament hange...

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a project where I printed ornament blanks on our 3D Printer and then topped them with recycled Christmas cards and UV resin . The blanks turned out so well, that I thought it would be fun to try to ink them. I've used alcohol ink on tons of ornaments (from plastic to glass to wood to ceramic ) and have had mostly good results, so why not. I have inked on 3D printed plastic before, but I've only stamped it (like these ornaments from last year) on. The reason I've only ever stamped 3D printed plastic is because of the grooves that are left from the printing process. The ink soaks right into those lines. So, I had an idea, why not put a tiny bit of resin on the bottom of the ornament to seal up those grooves. So I printed 3 ornament blanks and two of them got the UV Resin skim coat. As you can see in the first photo, I put very little resin on the ornament. Then I used a small piece of cardboard to swipe it around the ornament. Unfortunatel...

I'm at it yet again this December. I've fired up the 3D printer and can't help but print any pretty design for an ornament I can find. These little flat ornaments are so satisfying. They take very little time and filament and turn out so cool. This time, I found a set of geometric snowflakes . I printed these using standard settings (.2 resolution, 20% infil) with white PLA on our printer ( Ender 3 v. 2 ). Each snowflake took about an hour and a half to print. I actually was only going to print 3 of these (only, I know, I may have a problem), but they turned out so well, that I grabbed the whole set.

Last year I went a bit crazy printing Christmas ornaments on our new 3D printer . This year, I'm being a bit more selective. One of the things I knew I wanted to find a design file for was a good ornament blank. I knew I could do all sorts of fun crafts if I found a good one. Well I found the first one to try from someone who made and advent tree using these blanks . I followed the recommended settings (.16 resolution and 100% infil) with white PLA . The 100% infil made them pretty solid and meant that a fairly simple print still took an hour and a half to complete. After I managed to print a few of the blanks, I went through my stash of old Christmas cards which I save like a total craft hoarder (but it's not the first time I've used them: Recycled Christmas Card Ornaments ). I found a plastic lid that was really close to the the size of the inside ridge of the ornament blanks and used a pen to trace around the circle on the greeting cards and carefully cut them out. In t...