C
Caryn
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We printed the first octopus because Jill’s husband bet us the arms would fail. Eight of them, every one an overhang, no supports. It peeled off the bed twice. The third attempt finished around eleven at night, came out clean, and then sat on Caryn’s kitchen table for most of a year before we ever put it on the site.
Animal planters get bought the way people buy greeting cards. Cute, done, checkout. Then the box arrives and nobody knows what to put in the thing, so it holds pens by February.
That is a shame, because the shape actually changes how the plant grows.
We have printed a lot of shapes that looked great on screen and were useless on a shelf. Four things separate the keepers from the pen holders.
He is about 5 inches wide and 4 deep, which is the sweet spot for a small-to-medium plant, and he comes in 14 colors. He’s $11. Printed to order in Pennsylvania from plant-based PLA, like everything else we make.
Put something trailing in him. The arms and the vines end up arguing with each other and the whole thing looks deliberate instead of decorative. Pothos is the obvious choice and it grows fast enough to cover the pot in a season, though pothos is listed as toxic to cats and dogs by the ASPCA, so if you live with a chewer, a spider plant does the same visual job and is listed as non-toxic to cats and dogs by the ASPCA.
Here is the thing about giving someone a novelty planter: they have to like novelty. Most people we are related to do not. An owl gets around that. It reads as an object first and a joke second, so it lands on a desk at a hospital nurses’ station as easily as it lands in a kid’s room.
Ours is about 4 inches, twelve colors, drainage hole, $11. Caryn has given four of them away and has not had one come back.
A hanging animal is a different purchase than a shelf animal. It solves a space problem instead of decorating one, which is why it sells to apartment people and almost nobody else.
It also changes your watering routine, and not in a small way. You cannot see the soil from below, you cannot feel the weight of the pot without taking it down, and water that runs out the drainage hole runs onto your floor. We take ours down, water it in the kitchen sink, let it stop dripping, and hang it back up. Every time. It is the slowest-moving product in a shop where each pot takes about four hours to print, which feels about right.
Most of our animals come in twelve to fourteen colors and people default to white, which is the one we would argue with. White shows soil splash, and on an animal shape it flattens the detail that took four hours to print. The layer lines that give an owl its feathers disappear under bright white the same way a plaster ceiling hides its own texture.
Black and the darker greens hold shadow, so the shape stays readable across a room. If you want something lighter, crystal is the one we reach for, because it picks up whatever light the window is giving that day instead of fighting it.
Overwatering, mostly. The soil line sits down inside a shape you cannot see into, so people water on a schedule instead of by feel. Stick a finger in past the first knuckle. If it comes out damp, walk away.
The other mistake is volume. Two animals on a shelf is a personality. Six is a gift shop, and we say that as the people who would profit from you buying six. Mix them with plain pots and let the animals be the punctuation. It is the same argument we make about cute planters under $20, and we will keep making it.
Last one: do not put a $40 plant in a 3-inch animal. The plant wins that fight in about four months and then you are repotting a fiddle leaf fig out of a frog.
Small and slow. Haworthia, a young pothos, a peperomia, a jade cutting that has been in the same pot since 2023 and shows no interest in moving.
Air plants are the underrated option here, because they need no soil at all. A tillandsia sits in the cup of the octopus, gets pulled out for its soak once a week, and goes back damp-free. It is one of the easier moves in our air plant display ideas, and it means the shape of the planter never gets buried under dirt.
If the animals are not rude enough for the person you are shopping for, the next shelf over is where we keep the funny plant pots, and those are a different conversation entirely.
<p>The post Animal Planters: A Field Guide first appeared on Wild Buds 3D Printed Planters.</p>
Animal planters get bought the way people buy greeting cards. Cute, done, checkout. Then the box arrives and nobody knows what to put in the thing, so it holds pens by February.
That is a shame, because the shape actually changes how the plant grows.
What a good animal planter has to do
We have printed a lot of shapes that looked great on screen and were useless on a shelf. Four things separate the keepers from the pen holders.
- It swallows a nursery pot whole. Most of ours take a 3- or 4-inch grower pot as-is, so you never have to unpot anything or pack soil into a tentacle.
- It drains. Every pot we print has a drainage hole, because a sealed novelty pot is a very cute bucket.
- It reads from six feet away. If you have to explain that it is a hedgehog, it is a bad hedgehog.
- It does not tip. Tall animals on small feet go over the first time the plant leans toward the window, usually onto a laptop.
The octopus is the one we’d hand a beginner
He is about 5 inches wide and 4 deep, which is the sweet spot for a small-to-medium plant, and he comes in 14 colors. He’s $11. Printed to order in Pennsylvania from plant-based PLA, like everything else we make.
Put something trailing in him. The arms and the vines end up arguing with each other and the whole thing looks deliberate instead of decorative. Pothos is the obvious choice and it grows fast enough to cover the pot in a season, though pothos is listed as toxic to cats and dogs by the ASPCA, so if you live with a chewer, a spider plant does the same visual job and is listed as non-toxic to cats and dogs by the ASPCA.
Owls survive being a gift
Here is the thing about giving someone a novelty planter: they have to like novelty. Most people we are related to do not. An owl gets around that. It reads as an object first and a joke second, so it lands on a desk at a hospital nurses’ station as easily as it lands in a kid’s room.
Ours is about 4 inches, twelve colors, drainage hole, $11. Caryn has given four of them away and has not had one come back.
The sloth changes the whole equation, because it hangs
A hanging animal is a different purchase than a shelf animal. It solves a space problem instead of decorating one, which is why it sells to apartment people and almost nobody else.
It also changes your watering routine, and not in a small way. You cannot see the soil from below, you cannot feel the weight of the pot without taking it down, and water that runs out the drainage hole runs onto your floor. We take ours down, water it in the kitchen sink, let it stop dripping, and hang it back up. Every time. It is the slowest-moving product in a shop where each pot takes about four hours to print, which feels about right.
Color is not a small decision
Most of our animals come in twelve to fourteen colors and people default to white, which is the one we would argue with. White shows soil splash, and on an animal shape it flattens the detail that took four hours to print. The layer lines that give an owl its feathers disappear under bright white the same way a plaster ceiling hides its own texture.
Black and the darker greens hold shadow, so the shape stays readable across a room. If you want something lighter, crystal is the one we reach for, because it picks up whatever light the window is giving that day instead of fighting it.
Where people go wrong
Overwatering, mostly. The soil line sits down inside a shape you cannot see into, so people water on a schedule instead of by feel. Stick a finger in past the first knuckle. If it comes out damp, walk away.
The other mistake is volume. Two animals on a shelf is a personality. Six is a gift shop, and we say that as the people who would profit from you buying six. Mix them with plain pots and let the animals be the punctuation. It is the same argument we make about cute planters under $20, and we will keep making it.
Last one: do not put a $40 plant in a 3-inch animal. The plant wins that fight in about four months and then you are repotting a fiddle leaf fig out of a frog.
What we actually plant in ours
Small and slow. Haworthia, a young pothos, a peperomia, a jade cutting that has been in the same pot since 2023 and shows no interest in moving.
Air plants are the underrated option here, because they need no soil at all. A tillandsia sits in the cup of the octopus, gets pulled out for its soak once a week, and goes back damp-free. It is one of the easier moves in our air plant display ideas, and it means the shape of the planter never gets buried under dirt.
If the animals are not rude enough for the person you are shopping for, the next shelf over is where we keep the funny plant pots, and those are a different conversation entirely.
<p>The post Animal Planters: A Field Guide first appeared on Wild Buds 3D Printed Planters.</p>