Wedding Cake Topper

My beautiful fiancé, Lindsay, and I both decided it would be fun to make our own wedding cake topper and table numbers instead of buying them, so we did. Lindsay designed both the cake topper and the table numbers in her Cricut design software, then I imported a screenshot of her design into SolidWorks.

The Design Process

The Cricut software is pretty authoritarian about not exporting its designs for use outside of Cricut, so there's no option for any sort of actual file export. Screenshots it is.

Now, here, I realize I could've saved myself a headache: I could've converted that PNG screenshot to an SVG, the SVG to DXF, imported the DXF into SolidWorks, and had SolidWorks trace the outline for me. Instead, I took all of 25 minutes to trace every line myself with a spline tool. Luckily I only did this for the cake topper; I was smarter when I got around to the table numbers.

Finishing

After the parts were modeled and printed, I used a lighter to burn away all of the cobweb-like strings left on the print. These strings are common in 3D printing; picture pulling a cheesy slice away from a hot pizza. The same thing happens to the molten plastic when the printhead jumps from one section of the print to another.

Next, I primed, sanded, and repeated, until the primer hid the natural imperfections of 3D printing. Two coats of champagne gold spray paint sealed the deal, and they looked better than I could've hoped for. I was writing this a few days before the wedding, and I couldn't wait.