Last year, we bought a 3d printer. The main reason I wanted a 3d printer was simply how cool they are. I spent a lot of time just making stuff off of Thingiverse that I would characterize as cool toys. However, one day I happened across an article on something called a lithophane that you could 3d print. I thought that it sounded cool and looked pretty easy to to do because of websites like lithophanemaker.com and 3dp.rocks/lithophane/, so we made one. It was magic. The first one we ever made was this one of our puppy Margot. After messing around with different things, we made it into this nightlight. We absolutely loved it.
We showed it to our friends and many of them wanted one of their own. We started giving them as gifts and the response was fantastic. We then decided to try making them available to everyone and here we are! We hope some of you find the same joy in these little pieces of art as we do. The coolest thing about them is you can use almost any photo! The way a lithophane works is the different thicknesses of the material (PLA plastic in our case) allows different amounts of light to pass through. Since 3D printers are so accurate, you can print very detailed images this way. See below to get a better understanding of what I mean!
So now we launch the website. I hope some of you will enjoy this as much as we have and give us the opportunity to share these awesome nightlights with you. We are exploring other cool uses for our 3d printer and will be sharing those on the website as well! Link to the store is www.3dprintingfamily.com.
Thanks for reading!
Jamie Hayes
