3D Print your own book ornaments

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As you might know I have several hobbies. electronics is one of them and bookbinding another.

For the decoration of a book I needed some ornaments. Bookbinding shops are hard to find. And I did not want to wait for one of the few bookbinding fairs in the Netherlands. So I decided to try to build some myself.

I am not a metalworker or woodworker but I do have a 3D printer. And I set out to make the ornaments with that.

Search ornaments on the web

I started by using Google to search for corner-ornaments. And that turned out well, I found many.



Copy the image with ctrl print-screen and paste it in your favorite
image editor. I use The Gimp for that: https://www.gimp.org/



Cut out the picture you want and save that to your harddisk.



Use convert.io to convert it to SVG



Import the svg into tinkercad and scale it to whish.
Mine was about 4 cm width and depth. I scaled the height to 1mm and then exported the STL.



Next I imported it in my slicer. For simple things like this I use the Creality slicer.

I sliced this at .3 mm.
That meant that it will have 3 layers and prints fast about 10 minutes for 2 pieces



Next step was printing them. I used white PLA as that is the easiest color to paint afterwards.



The printed ornaments were placed on an old newspaper and I sprayed them with gold and silver acrylic paint. I used a spraycan for this and of course did it outside.



And here is the result. I placed them on a book (pen for scale) with an artificial leather cover and they look quiete nice !!! At the time I did not glue them on as I was not yet shure which color would match best.



At closeup you can see the printing artefacts. But you will not notice them from a distance. Next time I'll try the ironingsetting in my slicer. For now this is good enough for me.

Till next time,
have fun


Luc Volders