Maps, Giant Texas & St. Augustine

These two maps went together as a set.  Aside from being the first maps to use Med Brown instead of Saddle Tan the Texas map is the largest I've made to date: 16x16. 

The smaller map is of St. Augustine, FL and a little more typical of most of my maps.  I think the Medium Brown works with the water tinting better than the Saddle Tan so that's something I'll probably carry over on future maps. 

The scale of the Texas map made it pretty much impossible to do the usual ink transfer.  I wound up printing the design across four sheets of paper and manually tracing it onto the leather.  The client decided they'd like to add a few other elements after I'd finished most of the carving and that I had to just kind of eyeball directly onto the leather.  It only worked at all because the design is relatively simple.  I'm not sure how well I replicated the vintage map they were trying copy (the image was pretty blurry and I couldn't find other maps showing the same data).  And I'm frustrated with the text stamps.  They were all flush before stamping but because the stamps themselves are manufactured inconsistently the letters aren't all in line.  That said, I'm pretty happy with how the texturing and colors turned out.

Dice Cups, Family Set, PHB, Wonder Woman, & Flash

As someone who frequently sells handmade gifts I sure appreciate when clients put their holiday orders in well in advance.  These dice cups are meant to be Xmas gifts but I won't have to worry about getting them out the door in the midst of the annual holiday crush.  

The Flash cup required a new design that I based off some old, classic Flash lineart.  I added the lightning and used two different kinds of stain to try and make some contrast with the red background.  It's still red on red but there's just enough contrast to make the outline stick out.

Condition Tokens, Revised

When I posted the condition tokens for sale I'd always meant to expand them, particularly with some spell-specific tokens.  I'd still like to do that someday but there's ~80 spells in 5e that a token of some sort could be used for and there's all sorts of challenges in sorting that out.  In the meantime, I've been continuing to experiment with our weekly games and noted that we've been having a lot of use out of some generic buff/debuff tokens.  There isn't lots of buff stacking in 5e so using the same token for Bless and Shield of Faith hasn't been all that confusing.  In lieu of developing an all new line of tokens (for now) I've just added these new tokens to the set on the store.

DM Toolbox, Black & Blue

This was the first toolbox to use lambskin for the shell and I'm really happy with how it came out.  These toolboxes are pretty popular around the holidays and I've already received another order or two for more.

Map, North America in Quarters

I'm not entirely sure what the whole story was here but the client wanted to show the path these two people took together using a leather map and a few Canadian quarters.  Whatever the story is I'm all for that sort of thing!

They wanted to mark each of the cities by placing a quarter in the map where that city would be and tracing a line to where they met up in Washington, DC.  Canadian quarters are 23.9mm across but the closest bit I have is 25.4mm.  That 1.5mm difference is just enough to be obvious so I printed some cradles/sabots so the quarters would fit perfectly.

Another new thing I tried with this map was building a new faux frame around the finished map.  I used to do something similar on my earliest maps but with the stitching I figured it was worth trying again.  I'm pretty happy with the way it all came together!

Guitar Strap, Rush Clockwork Angel

About 2.5 years ago I made a trio of guitar straps for a friend's family, the first of which was a laminated strap based off the album art for Rush's Clockwork Angel.  This client must've liked how that one turned out because they requested nearly the same design, just in tan rather than red.

I've picked up a few tricks since early 2015 and my materials have definitely improved.  I used to use a glazed pigskin to line the guitar straps but this time around I used a piece of goatskin.  Goats aren't that big but by taking a cut down the spine of the hide I was able to get a piece just large enough to work for the lining.  It's very supple, almost deerskin-esque, and it won't slide as much as the pigskin.  It does make the edging a bit tricky but with the proper glue, a lot of burnishing, and some kote I think it's all worked out pretty well.

Buckle, Asterisk Design Group

A design company in Austin decided to celebrate a big job being well done with a set of custom buckles (very Texan of them 😀 ).  It was kind of cool getting artwork from a group that develops this sort of thing professionally.  They needed the buckles in short order but fortunately I had just enough of the backings to get them right out the door.