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Tracery

Printed in Malaysia, one at a time, after you ask for it.

There is no warehouse. Every shade begins as a spool of filament and a few hours of machine time, started the day after somebody buys it.

A lampshade a machine printed?

Yes. That is the point, not the compromise.

A shade is the one object in a room you look straight at with a light behind it. Printing lets the wall be a single continuous bead of material — 0.42 mm — which is thin enough that the material itself glows. Nothing moulded gets that thin and holds its shape.

What it is made of, exactly.

No adjectives. These are the numbers the workshop works to.

0.42 mm

One bead thick

A single continuous wall, no infill and no solid layers. Built the conventional way — 1.2 mm and two perimeters — the same shade takes 3.36 hours and 109 g and passes almost no light. This way it takes 1.54 hours and 40 g and glows.

Visible

The layer lines stay

You can see and feel where the nozzle laid each pass. They are not sanded out, because they are the honest record of how the thing was made — and because sanding a 0.42 mm wall would go straight through it.

60% / 23%

Colour is not a finish

Bone passes about 60% of the light through that wall; slate about 23%. Off, slate reads as a solid dark object. On, almost all you see is the pattern. They are different products, not different shades of the same one.

80 °C

Recycled PETG, not PLA

The shade is printed from reclaimed PETG — drink bottles and spool waste, reprocessed into filament. It was chosen on merit before principle: it is far less brittle than the PLA most printed shades use, which matters when the wall is 0.42 mm, and it softens near 80 °C rather than 60 °C. An LED bulb is still the only one that goes in.

Printed from rubbish, deliberately.

The filament is reclaimed PETG — post-consumer drink bottles and the spool waste the filament industry makes for itself — reprocessed rather than pressed from new pellets.

It was chosen on merit before it was chosen on principle. A 0.42 mm PLA shell is genuinely fragile; PETG is tougher and far less brittle, and softens twenty degrees later, so a sunny windowsill stops being something to think about. If it were worse to own, it would not be here.

It does cost something, and the cost is time. The same shade takes roughly two to three times as long on the machine in PETG as it does in PLA — it needs more cooling between layers, and a wall this thin has nowhere to lose the heat. That is a real constraint, not a talking point: it is why the range is six shades rather than sixty, and why nothing is printed before somebody has bought it.

One honest consequence. Reclaimed stock varies slightly from batch to batch, so two shades bought months apart may not match exactly. That is what reused material looks like, and it is why every colour here is described by what it does to the light rather than by a swatch.

Six at a time, and they change.

The range is deliberately short. Six shades are on sale, and which six is decided by what sells — four proven places and two that rotate whatever the numbers look like, so a design nobody has seen yet still gets its turn on the shelf.

Why buy from Tracery