Flowers with Vase

This is a flower, stem, and vase that I designed and printed as a Valentine's Day gift. The flowers are supposed to look like roses; I will leave it to the botanists out there to decide how close I came to the appearance of real roses. I used Fusion 360 to design the flower, stem, and vase.

I used some transparent filaments that I had sitting around, as I wanted my flowers and vase to have a glass-like appearance. (Specifically, I used some old AMZ3D Transparent Red and Green PLA [this brand no longer exists], some 3D Solutech Natural Clear [which looks white when printed], and some Ziro Transparent Purple PLA Pro.) I used Cura for my slicer. The flowers and stem were printed with a layer height of 0.24mm, with the initial layer being 0.28mm, with the extrusion line width set to 0.5mm. I used a print temperature of 205C for the flowers and stem, but had to increase the temperature to 220C for printing with the purple PLA Pro. (My extruder was skipping with the PLA Pro filament at the lower temperature.) The stem was printed with the leaves against the build plate. The vase was printed in Cura 'spiralize' vase mode, with an extrusion width of 0.6mm, and a layer height of 0.32mm. The vase was printed with my AMZ3D Transparent Red PLA filament at a temperature of 210C. For all of the prints, I had the bed temperature set to 65C. (My bed build plate is a spring steel PEI covered sheet.)

Note that the vase STL is a solid object (that is, I did not 'shell' it in my CAD system). You must either use vase mode in your slicer to print the vase, or print it with zero infill and no top layers.

I used a heat gun to randomly bend the petals, leaves and stem, and also remove any stringing inside the flowers. I tapped an M3 thread into the top of the stem, and used M3x16mm socket head cap screws to assemble the flowers to the stems. (You could probably also use either CA gel cement or epoxy to attach the flowers to the stems.)