Whether your pet is having a birthday, a party, is feeling down, or you just want to be the best owner that you can be, making personalized pet treats will let your furry friend know you care. Here is a step-by-step guide on making your own personalized treats from scratch.

I’ve been making/selling custom cookie cutters for a few years, so I’ve got the formula pretty down as far as making a cookie cutter that will work well and last you a lifetime! Now let’s get designing!

NEEDED:

-Computer and CAD software

-3D printer / Friend with a 3D printer / or 3D printing service (such as Shapeways)

-Treat Recipe, ingredients, and oven

Step 1: Drawing the Basic Shape

Start with the basic shape you’d like to make. Making treats for a bunny rabbit? Start with a carrot. Have a cat? Fish would be good. Want to pamper your pooch? Then a dog bone would work.

Open up your design software of choice (I'm a fan of Rhino) to start. Find a reference image to use or freehand (or freemouse) draw your outer shape, also deciding how big you want it to be. For our example here, I’m going to freehand draw a bone.

Step 2: Choose Font and Create Name

Choose a font for the name and resize and center it in the middle of your shape. If you’d like to use a font that is more funky than what you have on your computer, dafont.com has awesome free fonts for you to choose from! I wanted something fun for my friend’s basset hound Gus, so I went with this western themed font.

Step 3: Finishing Line Work

Next, we need to make our lines so that we can extrude a base and cutting edge for our design. Let’s design the following lines:

Offset our custom shape 1.7mm (for a cutting edge, blue line in the photo)
Offset our custom shape 4mm (for a base edge, green line in the photo)
Draw a box around our letters that will connect them to our base shape (red line in the photo)

Step 4: Extrusions

Now that we have all of our line work done, we can make extrusions!

Extrude the middle (red line) up 2mm
Extrude the base (original and green line) up 3mm.
Extrude the letters up 12mm (this will leave a nice impression for our
cookies)
Extrude the cutting edge (original and blue line) up 15mm.

The photo is color-coded so you can see what the extrusions should look like.

Step 5: Mirror and Finish

Since we are going to 3D print with our base on the surface, we need to flip our cutter over so that it will make impressions facing the right way!

Then, just union it together and export as an STL or whatever kind of file you 3D print from.

Gus.stl
Download View in 3D

Step 6: 3D Print!

The walls of our cutter are pretty thin, so we can use a pretty high infill percentage without using too much plastic or time! I personally find 65% to be the infill sweet spot, but have done as low as 20% with good results. A small cutter should take anywhere from 35-60min to print, while a large one can take as much as 2 hours. Also, feel free to scale up your cutter for making bigger cookies! The original size as described makes thin (about ¼”) cookies, so scaling them will make thicker cookies.

Step 7: Baking Time!

I’ve personally only made treats for dogs, and I’d recommend using non-sticky ingredients as they can get stuck in the cutter (think honey or peanut butter). Also, you need to use a non-rise recipe (or else all the letters will bake right out!).

I’ve gone ahead and attached an easy recipe I send my customers!