Hello, my name is Nicola, and I have an addiction. And it isn’t even one of the cool ones like booze or hard drugs that give writers a louche, tawdry appeal. No, I went and got myself addicted to 3D printing filament.

I blame Ramón for this, I really do. He was the one who showed me how he could print dollhouse furniture for me on his Creality K1, then he surprised the heck out of me by buying me a Bambu Lab A1 Mini in January 2025 with a roll of UJOYBIO hyperPLA in natural, the better to print sturdy miniatures with.

I went nuts with that thing. I bought scads of furniture and architectural files off of Ebay and used those to go to town on the architectural elements of my Painted Lady dollhouse (at left). All of the rococo elements on the eaves and tower, the corbels, and the decorations on the supporting pillars? All 3D printed. And I designed a set of fishscale shingles to fill in the attic wall. Like I said, I went nuts.

Then I discovered the wonder that is MakerWorld, the Bambu Lab model forum, where people were posting amazing 3D models of miniature furniture for free, and I downloaded a slew of new files from there. The next dollhouse I built was for a work colleague’s daughter who wanted a Girly Goth dollhouse, and I delivered in spades (at right). I designed the shingles, the porch spandrels, the window pediments and corbels, the railings around the roof, and the miniature brick flowerbed walls. I am so proud of that house I could burst.

In the process of printing an astounding amount of miniature furniture and architectural decor, I picked up a lot of nifty new 3D modeling skills with Blender and FreeCAD, mainly thanks to my coworker M who said, “Hey, if you like 3D printing and you’re good with graphics, you should really try these.” So I did, and I even wound up making a couple of brackets for things at work.

Seeing my output, Ramon touched his fingertips together and asked me to replicate a set of Vero PCB rack handles for him because he needed them in a variety of lengths and colors, and getting even a few in one size would cost beaucoup money. Tra-la, I found a mechanical drawing and duplicated the handles perfectly in PETG, even adding set-in screw holes just like the real handles.

Because my beloved does not know when to leave well enough alone, he then asked me to design a bracket that would hold a thermometer element in our pool pump timer that had failed (a generic thermometer element was $5 – the official replacement was over $100). I designed a bracket that fit the thermometer like a glove and could be printed in polycarbonate filament so that it would survive Texas heat.

Of course, in the process of doing all this I also picked up a significant amount of filament, raiding Ramon’s collection of white, black, and grey PLA first before discovering the twin enablers of Micro Center and Amazon.

But I didn’t realize I had a problem quite yet. I mean, yes, I’d discovered the joys of Micro Center and Amazon, but I only had maybe ten or twelve rolls of filament. That was perfectly normal, right?

And then I started designing and printing swag for my Patreon members and my newsletter readers, which ranged from cute little “arumigumi” printed sea creatures to mermaid earrings. Then I found this stunning dragonfly wing fan on Makerworld and planned on printing it in a variety of filament combos so that I could give them away. But to do this I needed really knockout, gorgeous filament in both opaque and translucent colors, which meant my existing rolls of filament were quickly joined by more from Inland, Elegoo, Sunlu, Protopasta, Cookiecad, and other gorgeous makes of filament in a wide variety of types, colors, finishes, and inclusions.

And then I thought, well, hey, I bet  lot of my readers would like bookmarks, and if I could find or design some that were mainly cutouts I could back them with a thin layer of translucent filament like the dragonfly wing fans. So I found some very nice fantasy-style silhouette bookmarks on Makerworld and backed them with filament, and indeed they were lovely. Then the same coworker who got the dollhouse saw them and mentioned that his girlfriend loved to read and really adored orchids so could I make an orchid bookmark in this style?

I most certainly could, thanks to a combination of FreeCAD, Illustrator, and Bambu Studio *takes deep breath* which then prompted me to make custom bookmarks for each book in the Olympic Cove series. At which point I looked at the completely full five-shelf filament rack in my office, the pile of rolls propped up next to it, the additional Protopasta shipments that were inbound, and thought, “…um.”

Now, compared to professional 3D print farms or serious hobbyists, my current collection is a drop in the bucket. But for someone who only started 3D printing eighteen months ago, I’ve somehow managed to garner *stops to count* 54 rolls of filament, not including the incoming Protopasta rolls and sample packs, and I am rapidly running out of places to store all of it. I’m already eyeing a replacement filament rack with seven shelves, which will require the relocation of my recliner from my office to the bedroom, but sacrifices must be made.

But that’s okay, because the filament is so pretty. And I can stop at any time, really. Right after I print some more fans and bookmarks for my giveaways.

(BTW, if any of you have 3D printers and would like to print my customized bookmarks for your own use, I’ll be setting up a directory of them here on the website where you can download them. Because I’m damned if I’m going to be the only one out there stocking up on pretty filament.)