3D Printed Garden Markers

Last February, my wife and I moved into a new house. Over the summer we had the neat new experience of learning how to garden, and of course I had to nerd out and make something special for our new hobby. Having recently been on a 3D printing spree, I was inspired to design little signs for each plant that would replace the miscellaneous tags that they came with.

It was way more simple than I had initially thought. I quickly mocked up a base template for the shape in Blender, then ripped icons and images straight from Google Images as references to trace Bezier curves and meshes that I could use to cut out of the base template.

Then I found a nice stencil font from dafont that I could use to slice letters out from the stem of my model that would spell the name of the plant. The tricky part was finding a stencil font that had wide enough bridges to the center of certain round letters (like “O and B”) that weren’t too small for the 3D printer’s resolution.

From there, it was smooth sailing. I could trace and cut out 3-4 plants per hour, and the total print time was only 1-2 hours, depending on the complexity of the traced icon. All in all I think this project was a success!

In Blender, ready to export

Scaled, rotated and sliced in Cura. Ready for printing!

My little Monoprice priner doing its best…

Several little finished labels in the wild! You can see why I needed a specific font… some of the letters (like the ‘B’ in “Beets” or ‘O’ in “Rosemary”) had the inside piece fall out since the connector was too small for the printer’s resolution. Love them anyways!