❄️ 3D-Printable Snow Lantern!

Create a beautiful glowing winter decoration with this 2D expandable Snow Lantern, designed to look like a stacked line of snowballs lit from within. Perfect for windowsills, shelves, or tabletop displays, this lantern brings cozy winter charm to any space.

🧊 Support-Free, Easy-to-Print Snowballs
Each “snowball” piece prints cleanly in PLA with no supports. The parts interlock in a simple, flat, vertical arrangement—a two-dimensional snowball pyramid—making printing quick and assembly effortless.

✨ LED Chain Lighting
Built-in channels allow you to thread an LED chain through each snowball, creating a soft, glowing trail of light. Translucent, white, or silk filaments work beautifully to diffuse the LEDs.

🔄 Expandable in Height and Length
Print as many snowballs as you want!
You can expand your lantern upward or sideways, creating anything from a small 3-ball decoration to a long glowing centerpiece or a tall vertical winter light. The modular design keeps everything aligned securely while staying flat in 2D space.

🎨 Customizable Look
Mix colors, switch filament types, or scale individual snowballs to create your own aesthetic—frosty, festive, minimalist, or playful.

🎁 Perfect for Seasonal Decor & Gifting
This simple but striking lantern adds instant winter ambiance and makes a great handmade gift for anyone who loves cozy lighting.

Print more snowballs, extend your glowing line of light, and build your perfect winter lantern—as big or as long as you want!

🎨 Optional Two-Color “Cartoon Edge” Style

For an extra eye-catching look, this model can be printed in two colors to create bold, cartoon-like outlines around each snowball. Using AMS, you can make the outer edges stand out in a contrasting color while the main body stays bright and translucent for lighting.

This gives the lantern a fun, stylized appearance—almost like a hand-drawn winter illustration brought into 3D. The inner color glows softly with the LEDs, while the darker outline emphasizes the snowball shapes even from a distance.

🌟 Model Features

• 2D modular system — build upward or sideways, but stays flat
• Expandable design — print more snowballs to make your lantern as large as you want
• Simple, clean assembly — snowballs interlock securely without glue
• LED channeling — thread a full LED chain through the snowballs for an elegant glow
• Beginner-friendly — prints easily on any machine and requires no supports
• Customizable — mix colors, mix sizes, or create patterns with different filaments

Assembly instructions 

There are predefined plates inside the 3mf file for basic 3x3 and then subsequent expansions for 4x4, 5x5 and 6x6. First plate has all different pieces that are needed. The connector plate has enough for the 3x3 lantern. If you want a bigger lantern, you will need to print more. The base plates come both with two or three connectors and wide and narrow versions. Select which ones you need depending on your size.

First thread the led chain into the grooves and secure it and the snowballs to each other with the connector. The led chain can be tunneled inside and routed under the base plate for tidy finish.

Different parts:

Cable tunneling: