Customizable vintage gingerbread cookie ornament

This customizable gingerbread man ornament is based on the vintage steel cookie cutter shown in the second image.

Customizable options include:

• Personalized words, including font and font size
• Height, thickness, frosting rim size, and other dimensions
• Whether to show clothing features
• Three types of hook eyelets available: planar hole (shown in first image), perpendicular hole, or ring (included in STL files)

Customizing

To customize your own, you don't need to know how to use CAD software. All you need is to have OpenSCAD installed, along with the BOSL2 library. OpenSCAD is free, open-source, and runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. You use the built-in Customizer in OpenSCAD to change the parameters you want and render your STL files.

This model takes a long time to preview, so I recommend:

1. Turn auto-preview off in the Customizer
2. Set your parameters as desired
3. Press the Preview button or press F5
4. Press the Render button or press F6
5. Press the STL button or press F7, to save the STL file

Printing

A sample STL file is included for single-color printing, or you can pause the print to switch filaments at specific layers to make colors. Features are at different heights to facilitate layer-change coloring.

The same sample model is also available as multiple STL file components for multi-color printing. The lead image shows prints from a Prusa MK3S with MMU2S using all five colors.

Print settings don't matter. Use default settings or whatever works for you. No supports are required.

Post-printing

Fashion a paper clip into a hook, guide it through the eyelet and bend as needed. Hang it on something, like a tree or a wreath.

How I designed this

To make this, I started with a photograph of the original steel cookie cutter. I loaded the image into the Desmos bezier curve calculator to get Bezier control points all around the inner perimeter of the gingerbread man outline and other inner features.

This was the first time I ever did anything with the BOSL2 library, which I needed for its offset() function that works on arrays of vertices rather than internal CGAL polygons that cannot be accessed. This let me offset the outline perimeter to different sizes, to generate elevation profiles of the cookie frosting rim, and then I stitched all these perimeters together into a polyhedron shape. The surface details are shapes laid on top of (or cut out from) the inner body surface.

Category: Decor