These are my latest 3D printed plastic earrings.  They are in the shape of trefoil knots, which seems to be a very popular theme in the world of 3D printing, along with other knots and mathematically related designs.

For me, this design is significant because it’s the first design done using Blender.  Blender has been probably the most challenging desktop app I’ve ever tried to learn.  For one thing, its UI is a ginormous amount of  hot keys.  This wouldn’t be so bad except that most of the tutorials seem to just mention the hot key without saying how you get there if you don’t wish to use a hot key.  Learning the operations first without the hot keys would help me understand it a bit quicker.

Like most people trying to learn it, I’ve scoured the web for some tutorials and googled for how to do something if I get stuck.    One site that I found useful as a starting point was cg cookie.   It has some nice video tutorials,  and the introductory ones are free.    It got me beyond the point of just staring at the Blender console with no idea of what to do.    I’ve now been looking for youtube videos.  One channel that I found helpful is John Malcolm’s channel.  His videos demonstrate the modeling of designs that can be used for 3D printing.