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Christopher Ross

The Free Shelf, September 2026: 20 images, 16 3D models, and two WordPress releases

There is a box at the end of a driveway near me on a weekend now and then with FREE written on the side in marker, and it is never junk. A bread maker that still works, half a can of deck stain, a kid's bike two sizes too small for the kid, once a perfectly good canoe paddle. None of it is broken. It stopped being useful to the person who owns it, and it is worth more to a stranger walking past than it is sitting in a garage.

I have a version of that box and I have never once pointed at it. Free things have been piling up across my site and a few other accounts for years. Images I commissioned for posts and will never use again. Models I drew for a job in my own garage and uploaded because why not. A plugin, a theme. All of it free already. All of it scattered across five places that do not talk to each other, which means nobody has ever seen the pile in one piece, including me.

The pile in one piece

So I sat down and made the inventory, and honestly the count surprised me. That is the transferable bit, if you want one out of this: go and list what your business already gives away for nothing. Not what you plan to give away, what is already out there and already costing you zero. Expect to find more than you thought, and expect it to be invisible, because it lives in five places with no index. The index is the cheapest marketing you will ever do. I gave a talk about this years ago and wrote about it again in Make a living giving it away, fifteen years on, and the argument has not changed much since. Giving the surplus away has paid me back, sideways and later.

Where would your list start?

This is the first of these. I will run one a month.

Twenty images, yours to take

Every one of these is doing a job on a live post or page here right now. They are AI-generated, which means there is no photographer or model to clear, and it is also why I would rather they got used twice than sat on one page forever. I'm releasing all twenty under a Creative Commons CC BY licence: free to use anywhere, including commercially. The licence does ask for credit and a link to the licence itself, and I will not chase anyone over it. Put one on a blog post, or drop it into a slide deck nobody outside your company will ever see.

Expect to find more than you thought, and expect it to be invisible, because it lives in five places with no index.

Free things I give away: images, 3D models, a plugin and a theme, spread across five places.
Images, models, a plugin and a theme, spread across five places.

Diagrams

Five of them are flat editorial diagrams, the ones that could be useful to somebody else. A diagram of a hub and four stages is a diagram of a hub and four stages, whoever's process it is.

Pencil on paper

Eight more are desks and paper. Notebooks, invoices, marked-up pages. They are what you reach for when the post is about a decision somebody has to make and there is no photogenic object anywhere near it.

An invoice, a key and a site map

A spoke shave, a compass and a lock gate

The last seven are objects, several of them old ones on a workbench, plus one lock gate. These are my favourites of the set, which I recognise is an opinion and not a recommendation.

Sort it out later

All twenty are attached to this post as downloadable files, so you can take one or take the whole set and sort it out later. If you get down the list and think you need images that look like your brand rather than mine, that is the paid version. It lives over in writing and editorial work. Take a moment to appreciate I did not put that sentence in the first paragraph.

Sixteen things you can print

This is the same habit somewhere you might not expect it: a garage instead of a text editor. I have sixteen models up on MakerWorld, every one of them free, and free in the way that actually matters over there: no points, no gate standing between you and the file. Some of them exist because I needed something, drew it, and ended up with a file sitting on a drive doing nothing afterward.

The penguin problem

Nine of them went up in one September week, and they are all ghosts. Halloween was coming, I own a 3D printer, and the rest follows. Each one is a little ghost animal that sits over a tealight.

I will confess the penguin went up twice, two minutes apart, because I clicked publish, watched nothing happen, and clicked it again like a man pressing a crosswalk button. Flawless logic. Nothing could possibly go wrong with pressing it a second time, and nothing did, except that there are now two penguins on my profile and only one of them is a design. Ignore the second penguin. The second penguin is a monument to my patience.

Eleven dollars and a drive

The older files are the useful ones, and they are all workshop and garden parts that I drew because buying the equivalent meant a drive and eleven dollars.

That last one, the drill centering jig, is released under CC0, which is about as close to public domain as a licence gets. Remix it, sell prints of it, put your own name on it, I genuinely do not mind. It is a cylinder with holes in it. The world does not need me to hold onto it.

In the directory

Two releases have landed on WordPress.org recently, and both are free downloads. You install them the normal way from inside your own dashboard and never touch my site at all. WordPress.org says plugins and themes inherit the GPL, so both are GPL.

Dashboard Notice Control

Dashboard Notice Control went into the plugin directory on 14 August 2026. By default it suppresses admin notices across the dashboard, by removing whatever is attached to the admin_notices hook and three sibling hooks. On a site with a couple of dozen plugins installed, those notices can fill a good part of the screen before you have read a single word of your own content. There is a settings page with a per-plugin allowlist, so notices from the plugins you name still get through. It hides core update nags too, so check for updates somewhere else.

Quillwork

Quillwork came out in July 2026. It is a typography-first theme, built for people whose site is built from words and who would like those words to be pleasant to read on a phone at eleven at night. I wrote about why I built it in A free, typography-first WordPress theme: meet Quillwork, so I will not run through it twice. The directory listing puts it in one line: the type is the hero, no photograph required.

Next month

Whatever is on the shelf that month goes in. Some months that will be four new images and nothing else. Some months there will be a plugin. I expect the next one to have more ghosts in it, because I have a printer and I have not learned anything.

If you take something off this list and it turns out useful, I would like to hear about it. If it turns out broken, I would much rather hear about that. Either way the contact page works, and you do not have to be hiring me to use it.

References

Checked against the CC BY 4.0 and CC0 1.0 deeds, the plugin listing, the theme listing, the hook reference and the license page, on 2026-10-11.

Christopher Ross

EdTech and AI for institutions that cannot afford for learning systems to break. LMS builds, curriculum, and accountable AI in teaching. MA candidate in Learning and Technology at Royal Roads.

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