I borrowed @pubultrastar’s 3-ring neck modification and altered the squarish design from Thingiverse to make it a bit more curvy and pleasing to my eyes, then cropped down a free coloring page design to etch on.
Pro tip: If you use the included floral design, don’t use PG HD engrave settings; it takes 'WAY too long. I haven’t done a second one yet, but I’ll definitely be playing with the settings next time to speed things up a bit.
This one is made from PG medium draftboard. I was kind of pooped out after my first week back to work after ankle surgery, and the coloring page design called to me, so I grabbed a gold oil marker (for the edges) and a gold gel pen (for the etching) and did some therapeutic coloring before assembling.
I didn’t plan it around a test tube as in the original pattern, so it will need some glue to hold it together. If you want to populate it with some wooden flowers, there are a couple of ring-shaped cutouts in the pattern that can be glued in strategically to keep the stems from sliding out between the “fins” of the vase.
EDIT: I used some of my “sit around recovering from surgery” time to vectorize the floral pattern. This is entirely untested. It’s full of unclosed vector shapes, so it’s basically a score-only design. If you try it before I do, let me know how it works!
It doesn’t show well in the photo, but there’s also gold in parts of the engraved design. It’s pretty subtle even IRL, but definitely adds a hint of class.
Oh wow, this is really neat! And it gives me an idea of what I could finally use those pretty patterns (“Waves of Good Fortune,” etc) they gave us in the catalog. Maybe do a defocussing score instead of engrave.
Great inspiration. I’ve got a bunch of glass cigar tubes. Hadn’t made the connection with this design until you did this. Didn’t grok the size of the piece. Yes. Well done.
Just out of curiosity, where do you source your test tubes? I had a couple ideas for making stem holders, but got turned off by the idea when I couldn’t find anywhere to buy just a few test tubes instead of in bulk.
I don’t. Well, I have some for testing aquarium water, I guess, but they’re 'way smaller than the one called for by the original pattern. My pattern doesn’t use one, although I suppose it might still fit.
Is this design originally supposed to hold a Test tube in the middle to hold “real” flowers and water?
I had been thinking along those lines (glass or plastic insert to hold real flowers) to tension the “fins” and provide something to lock it all together. Your comment made me think that perhaps that was the original intention all along?
Yeah, the linked Thingiverse file is built around a test tube. It wouldn’t take much (if anything) to modify mine back to that purpose – I wanted it for wooden flowers, so I wasn’t really paying attention to whether I messed up the inner dimensions, but if I did, it should be simple to fix.
I really have liked the different vases I’ve seen that were not watertight. And figuring out how to make it viable for real plants has definitely intrigued me.
