Elven Motif Keepsake Box — vesica plan, interlaced vine walls, two-colour leaf inlay

Elven motif keepsake box

83 × 55 × 27 mm, two printed parts, no supports and no hardware.

Most "elven" boxes are a plain box with one leaf stuck on the lid. This one is built the way a carver would build it: every ornament on it is the same primitive at three different scales. That primitive is the vesica — the pointed oval two overlapping circles make where their arcs cross.

That is the whole reason it reads as ornament rather than as decoration.

The walls are a real interlace

A two-strand vine braid wraps each flank, and it genuinely goes over and under: at every crossing the strand that passes beneath is interrupted for about 3.8 mm. That break is what a carver draws and it is the only thing that stops two overlapping sine waves reading as a flat chain.

A leaf stands in every eye of the weave, alternating which way it leans, and a small spur sprouts off every crest. Relief is 0.75 mm for the strands and 1.0–1.25 mm for the leaves — comfortably over the ~0.6 mm floor below which relief stops reading on a printed wall.

The leaves sit in the eyes of the braid, not on top of the crests. A leaf sprouting off a crest has only ~6 mm of wall between the braid and the rim moulding to grow into, so it is either invisible or it fouls the moulding. A leaf standing in an eye has the full braid amplitude of room, fills the void the weave opens, and costs no height at all.

The lid is a flush inlay, and it is cheap

The same braid is laid flat as a border ring, a stem bar crosses it tip to tip, and the centre leaf sits in the middle. Everything touches everything: the stem bar is the leaf's midrib and it meets the border at both ends, every vein runs into the midrib, and the four hanging leaves overlap the braid.

So the inlay is one connected shell by construction. Import elven_motif_box_lid_2c.stl, right-click → Split to Parts, and you get exactly two parts to assign filaments to — not twenty-four loose veins and leaves.

All of the ink is a 0.6 mm recess in one horizontal face, and the lid prints with that face on the bed. The colour change is therefore layers 1–3 of the lid: roughly 1 g of purge and the smallest prime tower the part can have. The wall vine is deliberately not ink — it spans about 120 layers, so inking it would cost ~42 g of waste to say what 0.75 mm of relief already says for free.

Single colour? Print elven_motif_box_lid.stl instead. Identical geometry, the motif simply stays engraved.

How it closes

An inset/step lid: the lid plate is flush with the outer wall and a 1.6 mm plug ring drops 5 mm down into the cavity, with a 0.6 mm lead-in taper so it self-centres as you set it down.

Retention is six discrete ribs standing 0.45 mm proud of the plug — not a continuous bead. A bead around this 230 mm non-circular seam would multiply contact length until the lid seized shut. Six points of 0.20 mm interference hold it; the long seam itself keeps its 0.25 mm of clearance and never binds. The ribs deliberately avoid the two filleted points, where a rib would push into the sharpest and thinnest part of the cavity wall.

Fit is one number, and it lives at the top of the attached .scad. Too loose or too tight after printing, change it and reprint the lid only — the base is untouched either way:

• lid falls off → raise rib_proud (0.45 → 0.55)

• lid binds → lower rib_proud (0.45 → 0.35)

No magnets, and none needed.

What fits inside

The cavity is 76.7 × 47.2 mm and 21.8 mm deep. The plug ring occupies the top 5 mm around the rim, so:

• something the full footprint of the cavity fits 16.8 mm tall

• something narrower than the rim fits the whole 21.8 mm

Rings, earrings, a watch, dice, guitar picks, a memory card, a folded note.

Parts

Two printed pieces on the plate. No hardware, no glue, no supports.

Printing

• PLA (PETG is fine) · 0.20 mm layers · 3 walls · 15 % infill · supports: none.

• ≈ 36 g and ≈ 3 h for the pair.

• Base prints as exported — flat bottom on the bed, cavity up. The vine is wall relief and slices as ordinary wall detail.

• The lid STL is already emitted upside down. The ornamented face is the bed face and the plug ring rises off it. The first layer is the full 81.6 × 52.0 plan, so adhesion is excellent and there is no overhang anywhere on the model. Don't flip it.

• Turn ironing OFF on the lid's bed face if you are printing it in two colours — ironing drags one colour across the other.

• Colour suggestion: sage or moss body with a bone/ivory or pale gold ink. Dark ink on a light body is the cheaper purge direction in general, but here the ink is a highlight, so light-on-mid reads better and 1 g is not worth optimising.

Parametric source

The attached elven_motif_box.scad is the exact file these STLs came from, and every dimension is a named variable at the top — plan length and width, wall and floor thickness, braid wavelength, amplitude and strand diameter, leaf size and lean, vein count and angle, inlay stroke width and depth, plug depth, clearance, rib count and stand-off. Free OpenSCAD, one command: