Braid Bowl | Textured Catch-all, No Supports

Customizable: the OpenSCAD source (.scad) is in the files. Open it in the free OpenSCAD app and use its Customizer panel (Window - Customizer) - that is what "Customize" refers to below.

A round bowl for keys, coins, rings and whatever else lands by the door, with the outside worked in a braid of raised stitches so it reads as something made rather than something moulded.

The stitches are not a texture map. Each one is a solid bead, leaning, and the rows are offset by half a stitch so they interlock the way a plait does. Change the bowl's size and the stitches re-tile at the same physical pitch instead of stretching - the file works out how many go round from the stitch width, not from a number you type.

It prints on its base with no supports. The wall leans outwards as it climbs, and the file caps that lean at 38 degrees from vertical and checks it, so the outside never turns into an overhang. The stitches are beads with curved undersides rather than bars with square ends - that is what keeps them self-supporting. Measured on the defaults there are 277 mm2 of surface steeper than 45 degrees: the fillet the bowl stands on, and the undersides of the beads, a few square millimetres each. Not a zero - but nothing on that list needs holding up.

The wall is 2.4 mm the whole way up, and that was worth measuring. Rounding a profile before revolving it rounds every corner it can find, including two that are not corners of the finished bowl at all: the ones on the centre line, and the one at the rim. Left alone the first stands a 6 mm cone up in the middle of the bowl and sinks a matching dimple under the base, so it rocks; the second takes the rim down to 0.06 mm, thinner than the nozzle, and costs a millimetre of height and nine of diameter. Neither shows up as an error anywhere - the mesh is watertight, one body, and it slices. This file draws the profile past both ends, rounds it out there and cuts back, so what survives is the fillet at the foot, which is where the rounding was wanted.

The inside is left plain. Texture belongs where a hand touches it, and a smooth bowl tips out and wipes clean.

Parametric: diameter, height, how far the rim flares past the foot, wall and floor thickness, the rounding of the foot, and the whole braid - stitch width, row height, how far the stitches stand out, how far they lean, and how much plain band is left at the rim and at the foot. Press Customize and the defaults give you exactly the bowl in the download.

Printing. No support, no raft, one piece. 0.2 mm layers. On an A1 in PLA the default 120 mm bowl is 1 h 59 min and 57.9 g. At 220 mm across or 120 mm tall OpenSCAD needs five to ten minutes to build it, so give Customize time.