Taylor Swift’s Lover Snowglobe (2022)

Alternate Title: Speedrunning Getting Copyright Strikes in Under a Week, New PB
Alternate-Alternate Title: Making a Fleur de Lis in SolidWorks Before Breakfast

Software: SolidWorks
Techniques: 3D Printing, Quality of Life Fab, Snowglobes

I Actually Don’t Know Much About Taylor Swift

But my sister is a huge fan! So behold my apocryphal secondhand retelling: in 2019 Taylor Swift released a physical version of a snowglobe that appeared in a music video for her song Lover. She sold a couple hundred of them on her store before discontinuing the product line, which was clearly not enough because by 2021 they were reselling for up to $5000 (with listings much higher).

With a few weeks before Christmas, no knowledge of Taylor Swift lore, and even less knowledge about snowglobe manufacture, I decided my 3D printer and I were the heroes no one needed.

Pre-Design

All things considered, this was a fairly straightforward project to execute. The tricky part was that I decided to start after Thanksgiving and needed to ship at least a week before Christmas in order to get it under the tree in time—but all things considered, this is miles more forgiving than most timelines I’ve put myself in. But it did mean I had to cut some of my wishlist features, such as music playback, and save them for a Rev2.

Snowglobe globe kits are surprisingly common these days. I spent a bit of time scoping out one that was both a reasonable size and made of glass (a lot of the kits use a plastic globe instead, which I don’t like the feel of), and while that was shipping to me, I got to work designing the base. I’d need to wait until I could get calipers on the globe part to make sure the dimensions were good, but I could get the main parts set up.

Design

SolidWorks is a cool sleek engineering tool that needs to be coaxed into making pretty things. I plopped some reference images into my sketch planes to get the loose dimensions—most of the reference images are just people taking pictures of their snowglobes at oblique angles, so no Top/Right/Front setup for me—and got to work. I wanted the base to have a retaining feature for the globe to provide a hard stop in addition to adhesives, and I wanted to make the base print in at least two parts. This was both so that it’d be easy to go check on the globe seal later, and so that I could flip the bottom half over so that the legs would print without support. I also dropped in some holes for heat-press threaded inserts to save me some time later.

The perimeter decorations relied on some, hmm, interesting sweeps and surfacing techniques that I would probably revisit if I needed to sustain this model for much longer than I did. I had a lot of fun putting in way too much detail in the tiny house that would never show up in printing, like the tiny shingles. One thing I really hadn’t expected was how much smaller the snowglobe makes the house appear—I ended up having to reprint the house at roughly 125% because the one that looks to-size in CAD looks absolutely tiny in water. Refractive index calculations were also scrapped features for this timeline.

And, of course, I included the most important feature in designing plastic-ish desktop items: the big hollow cavity for putting in a large rock. The rock is important because it shows up on airport scanners and makes TSA incredibly confused. It also adds a more luxurious feel. This sounds incredibly hacky, because it is, but it’s also an incredibly common practice in consumer products (though they tend to use machined steel instead of garden rocks).

Popped some ease of assembly chamfers and offsets, and it’s off to the printers.

Assembly

The sold snowglobe has molded trees, but I really like the look of model trees instead—and that’s the kind they use in the original original snowglobe, in the music video, which happened to be where I was pulling my reference shots from anyway. I topped them with some snow paint, sealed them (and the tiny house), and then presoaked them, the tiny house, the snowflakes, and the base in distilled water so that they’d absorb any water they needed to. Ideally they wouldn’t absorb any (which is what the sealant is for), but since they’d be submerged long-term, I didn’t want them to absorb water later (as that would create air bubbles in the globe itself).

Assembly on this one ended up relatively straightforward as well. I added a few drops of isopropyl alcohol to the snowglobe water to keep it from clouding long term, along with roughly a teaspoon of glycerin to make the snowflake particles fall a little slower.