3D Printing Personalized Gifts with Tinkercad | An 8th Grader’s Design Process

13th March 2025 • Case Studies

Guided by PrintLab’s Personalized Gifts project and her teacher, Allison DeBellis of Pembroke Community Middle School, Violet documented her design journey in a detailed portfolio, which we’re excited to share with you. The rest of this blog features images and written reflections from Violet’s portfolio. Let’s take a look!

Violet’s Portfolio

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3D Printing and Personalization: “3D printing is very useful for personalized gifts. You can easily upload a design and customize it, or even make something completely new. The constraints are the size, and the time that it will take you to make the gift customized”.

End User Profile: “The end user is my older sister, Tess. She loves the color purple, and loves scuba diving and the ocean. Her favorite animal is an octopus, and she just started college, so I wanted to make her something that she can organize her desk with. The pencil holder she has is just a mug, so I wanted to make her a personalized pencil holder”.

Idea Generation: “I knew that I wanted to do a pencil holder, so, for the icon sketching, I experimented with different shapes and placement of the words and design that I wanted to be on the pencil holder”.

Idea Selection + Criteria: “I had criteria for what the final result would look like. The final product had to be printable. It also had to be ocean themed, able to hold pencils, and had to be purple. It also had to be the right size”.

Concept Development: The original sketch was a box shape, with a simple octopus design. I added my sister’s name, and I also added to the side of the box. I created other options, and then picked one. I then started to make it on Tinkercad. I started with the shape, and then added the design. I made a few changes to the box, like the design on the side, and then I printed it.

Designing + Making: The key features of the design were the name and the octopus shape. To create the name, I used a text box, typed in her name, and then fit it to size. To make the octopus, I used the circle shape, and then used the too to draw my own legs. I then connected them, turned it into a hole, and then put it on the side of the box.

Reflection: My end user enjoyed her gift. She found it useful, and she enjoyed the customized design. The project mostly turned out how I wanted it to, but there were a few improvements I would have made. In the design, the front of the pencil holder had five hearts, but the same heart fell off all three times that I printed it. An improvement I would like to make, would be to figure out why it fell off, and preventing it from happening again. Otherwise, it was a good project, and my end user enjoyed it!

Huge thank you to Violet and her teacher, Allison DeBellis, for sharing this awesome work with the PrintLab community!