(sweet) Tea Handle

I'm not one for coffee or tea. I'll rarely have a coffee in the morning, and that's only if I feel like I won't stay awake through class without it. Tea is reserved for moments where I'm levelheaded enough to want it to relax. However, as a boy raised on southern dining and hospitality, there is one thing I drink almost religiously, and that's sweet tea. Truth be told, I haven't had a true southern molasses-brewed tea in a long while, but Pittsburgh's own Turners Dairy does make a pretty good tea, even if it is a mix. Additionally, I feel healthy enough drinking it too - there's hardly any sugars or carbs or anything really in that stuff, whereas Brisk or Gold Peak start to get towards soda territory. 

From the start, I figured I'd be making a cup handle. I interact with paper cups fairly regularly - a fountain soda during a lunch at The Exchange is the norm, and also where I snagged this cup from, and I get my dinner at Schatz regularly, and their paper cups are small and frequently refilled. My question from there was to decide what kind of handle I'd make.

I started by throwing out a bunch of ideas. I'm no stranger to acrylic, and I wondered what kinds of things I could explore. Some ideas were focused on ergonomics, some of flowing forms, and others in joinery. I went through and marked the ones I liked, and from there, found the idea I liked the most. Admittedly, the thumbnail sketches would read a lot better if my default sketching lead was darker than a 6f. Maybe I could use pen.

I speculated on different methods of joining these odd shapes together. I could do a lot with three planes of acrylic, and it was cool that they weren't all parallel and perpendicular.  Originally my design intent was to create something that could be taken apart or that could snap together without glue. After all, if everything was just glued together, then where would the fun of designing joinery go? In the end, my priorities shifted towards the design and ergonomics.

From there I modeled and revised. the 1/8" acrylic scrap I was working with let me rapidly test new joints. I realized that I would have to lower the handle and add more material in the loop to fit well in my hand.

The fourth prototype held together well, and if not for how much it swayed when holding a full cup of water, I would have stopped there. However, I went back and adjusted the model for a 1/4" sheet of acrylic I had been saving, and with a bit of tweaking it worked.

The thicker acrylic was much more stable, and the extra surface area made it more comfortable to hold. If I wanted to, I could go back and enlarge the locking lugs between the holder and the loop, as the thicker acrylic was much more rigid, and wouldn't have twisted like the 1/8" acrylic. I also learned that there was enough area for the cup to slip off the little platter, which shifts the center of gravity enough to hang well from a loop, even when carrying all of the prior iterations.

I also put together a mood board that's about me and how I go about my day, and then arranged by color roughly.