Despite what you might guess from the name, our Egg-Bot kit is not just for eggs.  In fact, it turns out to be a pretty freaking amazing machine for decorating and personalizing your own Christmas ornaments!

Today we’re releasing the “Eggbot Holiday Super Pak” — a set of Eggbot-ready holiday ornament designs to give you a head start.  The set includes the designs above and many more.  It’s free, available for download as part of our EggBot Example set (on our GitHub releases page), and will be periodically updated as we add more designs.

Read on for some additional tips and tricks for using ornaments in the Eggbot!

Christmas ornaments up to 4″ (100 mm) in diameter will fit in the Eggbot. We like these satin-finish glass ornaments, as the frosted finish is easy to grip, holds ink well, and gives excellent contrast for ink. By contrast, shiny silver balls and transparent balls make it much harder to see markings.  Sharpie markers work extremely well on these, producing vibrant, long-lasting colors.

There’s a neat way to mount an ornament in the Eggbot, which is to remove the little cap and hanger that come with it.  Both come out with a gentle, straight pull.

Then press the ends of the clip to pull it out of the cap.  Set the clip aside, and place just the cap back on the ornament.  That leaves you with a nice cap that you can use to grip the ornament in the Eggbot.

Then, mount the ornament in the Eggbot, with the pen-motor shaft facing directly towards the fattest part of the ornament.

In order to provide the most grip on the ornament, it’s usually best to orient an ornament’s cap towards the tailstock as shown above.  But, since that’s the opposite of how eggs and things are normally oriented, your patterns will end up upside-down on the ornaments!

To fix this, you can either (a) flip the pattern upside down or (b) use a clever trick:  In the “Options” tab of the Eggbot interface, check both boxes, to reverse the direction of each motor.  Then, your designs will all print right-side up.