3D Printed Purple Tiara Headdress with Flowers and Ribbons for International Women's Day

We were asked to wear purple for the International Women's Day morning tea at work, and I didn't have any clothes. 3D printer to the recsue!

Here's me showing off the final product

I made this headdress using a tiara shaped 3D print that I designed, along with some silk flowers, ribbons and a headband.

The model was printed flat (here's a render of it in the print orientation).

The bend is made by attaching it to the headband. I made the model by cutting a real-life bit of paper and test-fitting it to the shape of my head (while wearing the headband), then I (flat-bed) scanned this into fusion 360 and traced it using a spline.

The floral filigree is based on a William Morris print called Lodden. He's my favourite pattern designer.

William Morris made this pattern in 1883.

I imported an image of Lodden into photoshop and grabbed the channel with the best contrast, then fiddled with the levels until it was black and white in the right areas to form this stencil, then got illustrator to trace it for me.Then I imported the spline I made in fusion 360 (after exporting it as a pdf drawing), and used the pathfinder to cut off the excess of the Lodden pattern.

It also made it super glittery on the back. ✨😱✨

Then I saved this image as an SVG and imported into Fusion 360, to extrude it, and a little boarder around it for strength (made using the offset tool), before slicing it in Cura using the concentric top and bottom pattern, because it was in keeping with the organic shapes.

Then exported and printed the SVG in Polyalchemy Elixr on my Anycubic kossel Linear Plus. Then I hand-sewed the print onto a headband (giving it the curved shape), and also sewed on the flowers and ribbon.

Voila!

All in all it only took me a couple of hours, which surprised me! I never expect these things to come together so easily.

I think if I had more time, I'd have liked to make the headband printable too, I was thinking some kind of T-shaped recess I could slide the tiara into would be cool.

If you'd like to make your own, I've uploaded the model to Thingiverse

If you want to join in the conversation, I spoke about this particular project on a few different platforms with folk:

• Twitter: WiP, Final

• Discord: WiP, Final

• Reddit

• Imgur

• Thingiverse

And of course if you liked this project and want to support me making more, you can do so over on Patreon where you will earn my eternal gratitude.

Hope you enjoyed!

Happy printing!

Much love,

💜Billie