This week I’ve been trying out different square shade ideas for our Andon lamp base.

One is a frame which transparent acrylic rectangles slide into to allow you to have engravings on the acrylic so it can be customised but also lets lots of light through so its useful as well as cool and customisable. I still need to add a set of legs to hold it on the base and a top to hold the acrylic in place but it looks cool so I’m happy to keep working on this design to get it to a working product.

Last week I found a great quick way to create 2D sketches in Onshape https://www.onshape.com/en/ . I wanted to make some 3D prints to put on my dad’s celebration cake. I found you can create a sketch in Onshape then insert an image into it, having the image makes it easy to trace the shapes in the image by using a combination of splines and lines joined to form an enclosed shape. In my case I was creating logos of the companies my dad had worked for many years, so the images are logos.

I had a great brainwave last week…..Fruit Ninja it. The thing I wanted to tackle but I was slightly avoiding it, was using Onshape to make organic shaped parts, reason: so I could finally design a pumpkin for Halloween!

You may be familiar with the Fruit Ninja game, you chop fruit as it flys at you into smaller pieces.

Well pumpkins you cut into sliced wedges for baking. So I decided to try modelling in 3D a wedge rather than a whole pumpkin because I knew you could duplicate shapes to make the whole pumpkin to get the bumpy curved surface.