For Dragoncon 2024 my wife, Rebecca was making a Ms. Minutes/TVA themed dress. Instead of doing a cute hat for the outfit she wanted a piece of key lime pie on a plate. This is the number one dessert to get at the TVA cafeteria. She asked me to come up with that part either making it or printing it.

I spent some time in Fusion just playing around. I’m not that great at modelling things and especially not great at organic structures. I have made a whole helmet in Blender for my Isaac Clarke (Deadspace) outfit from 2022. That was a herculean journey and honestly I’m surprised I finished it, I’ve never really done anything that big and I was under a time crunch for it. BUT I’ve been focusing on Fusion lately so I didn’t want to try getting back into Blender. After spending an hour or so I was sure I wanted to just download a file because I knew my time needed to be focused on my Imperial Security Officer (Non-Saga) for this year.

I did what I do first when searching for a print and searched Thangs.com. That led me to this file: Pumpkin Pie Slice. I knew I needed a custardy style pie and the whip cream on top was perfect.

The next step was to print it. I spent some time thinking how I would make a good looking piece of pie. As soon as I realized I could color the resin to give that translucent green look I knew what my next step was. I asked Rebecca is she wanted it to have lights in it because of course I want to make it light up.

I went to the resin printer got some clear resin mixed with green and white alcohol inks. After a few minutes of mixing and adding more ink I was happy for a first test print. Of course, might as well print the whole piece. The color was SPOT ON. I was ecstatic. I knew I needed to make more than one so I could experiment while painting/finishing so I made some adjustments and added a hole in the bottom for me to put lights inside of it.

I didn’t just want a lump of green pie. Painting the crust, whip cream and plate would be necessary to block the led lights and make it look good overall. I’m not that great at painting but I did test and then paint the crust and whip cream on the test piece. I also got primer on the plate so we can spraypaint that. I also tested a gloss finish on the whip cream white as well as the raw resin for the key lime part. This looked great and let me know the final piece will need multiple layers of the gloss.

Surely it must glow

Rebecca wanted a piece of pie that would glow. I was more than happy to oblige, I love making little circuits like that. Like many other things, I know I’m not great at it but it sure is fun. I had some green leds from past projects that would be perfect so I grabbed some and trialed a few different resistor values. I thought it would be a good idea to have a switch to turn it off and on as well as a switch to change between dim and bright. Bright for the daytime outside and dim for indoors. I selected the two resistor values I thought would be good and knocked out a quick circuit on some project board.

I got a little heavy with the solder in some spots but I was quite happy with how I managed the leads. I had planned on powering this with a tiny salvaged lithium battery and a tp4056 circuit. The plan for this was to be worn on her head as a fascinator. Giving this a trial I was very happy with the initial pass.

It ended up being VERY bright. Even on the dim setting. I snipped some of the leads to the leds from the dim circuit. I’m not quite sure why but there was some bleed through so while the clipped ones weren’t full power they were still lit. I began leaving it on while we were working on other bits of our outfits to see how stable it was and there were zero issues so it was time to work on finishing it up.

I placed a piece of led diffuser right over the leds to give it a more even glow and this helped the internal look of the pie a lot.

I modelled up a simple low profile cylinder that can get glued to the fascinator Rebecca bought and can be fastened to the bottom of the pie plate to hold the electronics. I gave it a quick few coats of paint+primer to limit the bleed through of light. Once we were in Atlanta, Rebecca glued a strip of orange fabric to help hide the box and blend into the fascinator better.

Here we are in our Loki inspired costumes. Isn’t her skirt awesome?