The chair.

OBJECTS OF OBSESSION #4: MAKING IN 3D

Jan 29, 2025

Some time last year I found myself making a gift for my dad without quite realising the scope of it. I just sort of started, and ended up with a fully realised recreation of the shed he had built in his garden - now the miniature version I built in its honour sits on a shelf in their house - as it should (you can read that post here). I thought that would be it for a good long while, as my desire to make things such as this comes and goes - the latter is usually when I’m suddenly more into writing, or photography, or videogames, or whatever other hobby I enjoy. Anyway, as I sometimes do, I get an intense desire to learn 3D modelling - specifically with Blender. When at school I learnt how to use Rhino a good bit, but I never had an ongoing use for it, and as such I forgot most of what I learnt. Years later I picked up Blender, but again I had no ongoing use, so forgot it all. Over and over again this seems to happen, and the last time was a few months ago - I became obsessed, but only for a week or so.

I followed a bunch of the latest tutorials, and had a little splurge of modelling fun with what I learnt, but once again, with no real ongoing use for it, I stopped. What happened this time however was a bit of professional development, as I used one of the models I made to teach myself the fundamentals of 3D printing. I’ve worked at my current posting for over five years now, but never had the opportunity to utilise the 3D printers there - they are old, and basic, but that’s exactly what you need when you’re teaching yourself something new. The hard work is mostly in the modelling, but there are nuances in the printing, and a lot of experimentation was required to get the kind of results I wanted. It was all just a bit of curious fun, so I wasn’t too concerned with the results, but I wanted to make something I was happy with, and after printing some test objects from the Thingiverse website, I thought I’d try printing something I had modelled myself - that being the chair pictured above. The first few were terrible, but after a couple more tries (dropping several and watching them shatter in the process), I ended up with a solid and quite detailed print.

The print turning out ok gave me an idea for a gift, this time one for my mum. You may be familiar with the Maileg toys - these are tiny mice and other animals which you can collect along with a vast array of finely crafted furniture and accessories. They are beautifully made, and very sweet. Like many people, my mum has a soft sport for the few mice she has acquired over the years, and I thought that perhaps I could make her a chair for one of her tiny chums.

My first print was a little on the small side however, so I decided to print a couple more, scaled up a bit. These, after being filed down and sanded felt very satisfying in the hand, and were just about the right size for the little community of mice. The filament I used was orange, and while this looked quite cool, I knew what my mums aesthetic considerations were - my parents basically live in a more modern and bare version of the bedroom from 2001: A Space Odyssey. With that in mind, I thought a nice coating of white paint would suit - my experiment with other colours on a previous smaller print looked quite terrible too, so I wanted to keep things simple.

To try and get as good a finish as possible, I sanded the chair with an ever increasingly fine grit paper until it was smooth to the touch. Once that was done, I cleaned off the dust and began building up coats of paint, using a grey as a base coat to fill in the gaps and to further disguise the orange plastic. Once this was done, I sanded the chair again, and after cleaning and drying it, I began applying the white. I have always known that with spray-paint, light coats and many of them is the best way to get an even look, but no matter how many times I use the stuff, I always get impatient. This resulted in a few mistakes with lumpy sections, bits missed, drips, and in trying to expedite the drying process, some of the paint melted… Some sanding off and reapplying was required because of my impatience and stupidity, but eventually I got the chair to as good a finish as I could manage (without having the paint clog up what little detail remained in the cushioning).

With the chair finished to my satisfaction (well almost), my focus shifted to the packaging. I was initially just going to box it up and wrap it nicely, but I thought, as the chair was for a mouse, I could go one step further and package it in a more realistic manner. Enter the laser cutter. I drew up a little design for a shipping crate, and after gluing it together, affixing the chair within it, and chopping up a load of packing peanuts, the chair was ready for shipping/gifting, and I added the little package to my mums Christmas gifts, allowing for her little mouse to take a load off in her tiny house.