Coasters & Dice Cups

I had a couple large orders for dice cups and/or coasters recently.  Great opportunities to get new photos on the new booth!

Stein Coasters

One of my recurring clients is still kitting out their new game room and wanted a trio of giant coasters to accommodate the beer steins their players use.  Of course they needed to have some classic D&D art and of course I was only too happy to oblige.  These coasters are 5" across and in the process of making them I beefed up the bases so they'd be a bit sturdier.  Came out pretty shiny!

Giant Order of D&D Awesome

I have a few awesome clients who keep coming back to snag more and more and this guy's one of them.  They moved this summer and had the opportunity to set up a dedicated game room which meant loads of new goodies.  This order started with the map case and coaster set but we added the Ehlonna chain pull while the others were being produced.  It's now hanging off ceiling fan in the finished game room.

Chemical Formula Coasters

Sometimes you just have to do something geeky and nerdy and goofy and fun.  That's my position anyway.  I'm not convinced there's a huge market for coasters (outside of informal christmas gift exchanges) but I rather liked the idea of tossing some chemistry in.  At first I was going to do include tea, coffee, and soda but that didn't quite work out.  The first molecule I picked for tea, Theflavin, turned out to be too large to fit on a coaster.  Seriously.  And of course soda is a complex, unholy solution of ichor and other not-so-good things.  And it occurred to me that nobody's probably going to need a coaster with their coffee, so I dropped those three and went with Catechin (tea), caffeine (pretty much everything) and ethanol (boozes) in addition to sucrose (sugar) and good ol' dihydrogen monoxide (water).  I figure this way, no matter what someone's drinking, they'll probably have a constituent molecule on their coaster.

Cool & Collected Coasters

Coasters seem like the classic introductory item to leatherworking, though these are almost the first coasters I'd ever made.  There doesn't seem to be any shortage of leather coasters available on Etsy these days, but it seemed all the ones that were part of a set were from the Tandy kit.  While the Tandy kit is probably perfectly dandy, it seemed more interesting to me to develop my own case for my coasters and that's what I did.  A bit of brainstorming, a dash of drafting on the computer, and a few paper prototypes to get the sizing right and bing-o!  Perfectly fitted cases using a minimal amount of material.


While I was changing up the norm I figured I'd experiment with some different tooling patterns.  Rather than having five identical coasters I figured it'd be interesting for each coaster to have a different pattern.  If nothing else it seems like it'd help keep track of who's cup was who's.

Each of the coasters and cases were treated with an antiquing gel.  One set received the Dark Brown treatment and the other set received the Mahogany color.  The treatment method was pretty much identical from coaster to coaster and the cases but I couldn't help but notice the Mahogany treated cases turned out far more "purple" than the coasters.  It just goes to show that every hide of leather is just a bit different.
Of course, the dragons all had to be painted to be properly given their dragonly due.  After that came a few thick coats of finish to make each coaster as shiny, and water resistant, as possible.
The final coup de grace was a double loop lace around the border of each coaster.  Aside from just looking nicer this helps the coaster hold onto the surface its sitting on.  I'd imagine it might help hold on to wayward liquids as well, but I haven't really tested that.  The first two sets used a nice supple calf lace that I tend to use for most of my lacing but the dragons seemed like they could use a beefier latigo lace.  It works pretty well for them I think but I had to go to a single loop to make the thicker lacing work.  I'd originally alloted myself 3 days to complete the entire build but that was before I remembered how time intensive lacing can be.  It took me 6 days to finish tooling, staining, painting, and lacing all 15 coasters. I'm pretty content that the time was well spent though.