Bobbins for intarsia

When I had the privilege of meeting nophead and his good lady last month, one of the questions I was asked was whether I had made lots of useful things for my wife. Reluctantly, I had to admit that I had only made her a keyring, so far.

My opportunity came yesterday when she asked me for help with a specific problem. My wife enjoys making things as well but her filaments are more of the sewing and knitting variety. Recently, she has been experimenting with a kind of knitting called intarsia, which calls for lots of different coloured strands of wool to be in use at the same time to build a picture. You'll get the idea from this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7G4yzCzpHk (skip to 3:30 to see the bobbins).

I designed the basic shape in Tinkercad and then did a bit of tweaking in Blender.

She was delighted with the result and now understands how useful my expensive new toy can really be.

Instructions

I printed mine with two perimeters and two solid layers to give a bit of weight. They are 3 mm thick, so 10 layers at 0.3 mm layer height.

I added the holes, a) to save plastic, b) to reduce the weight, and c) to allow the wool to be tucked through at the start of winding.

I can fit four of them on my Mendel90 but found that manual placement was more efficient than just printing multiple copies in this case.