Catching up in the New Year

Whew!  That was a whirlwind of a holiday season.  I've got two months of blurbs to retro-actively write but, in my defense, I was averaging ~70 hour work weeks for much of the season.  There were some very interesting orders in there that I'm looking forward to turning into posts.

Overall 2017 was a pretty great year, at least professionally.  I'm still crunching numbers but the numbers I would want to go up are all going up.  For the next couple of weeks I'm figuring out the best ways to continue that progress and "manage my success" in a way that doesn't result in a 3 week backlog.  To that end I'm making some changes to the D&D coins, both to improve the consistency and speed they can be produced, as well as adding a few new listings during January.  Unfortunately I had to retire the DM Toolbox listing since it just takes too long to produce the way I've been doing it.  I have some ideas on how to improve the design and the speed so hopefully by Fall I can introduce a new-and-improved version of the Toolbox.

Carving cowskins doesn't have much in common with soothsaying but it's looking like 2018's going to be an even better year for Foster Leathercraft!

Dec Express

I shipped a lot of orders last month and several are nice enough to have a blurb but don't really have enough details to have a story.

D&D Binder

I never received any specs from the client so I can only hope the binder is close to what they had in mind.  It gave me an opportunity to finally use some of the brown lining material I've been wanting to try out and I'm pretty happy with the result.  It's got a good, supple feel to it and I expect I'll be using a bunch of it going forward.

Coins, 5e

The client wanted a set of coins based on the artwork in the 5e PHB.  When I was prototyping my original currency I'd started with the 5e coins but soon found that I could get anything like the art on the coins to come out of the 3D printer (at least on a practical scale).  I'd still based some of my original coin models on the classic currency so I had a good place to start.  Fortunately the client was mostly interested in the shape and color of the coins, not their artwork.  In the process I've found this style of coins was much faster to produce and a bit more economical too.  I'm hoping to make some small tweaks here and there and start offering them as a permanent listing next year.

Map, Amequela

Not so long ago I'd made a map for a client's homebrew campaign that turned out awesomely.  Turns out that client had a friend with a relation who'd also been running their own homebrew campaign for a few decades.  The scale was a bit of a challenge (the original map is handdrawn over 4 sheets of paper) but I really like how this one came out.  It's an interesting challenge adapting someone's homebrew map into leather and it's one I get to keep enjoying over and over again.

Dice Bag, Bison

Dice Bags were some of my original patterns but I don't get to make them too often.  This one was a nice return to an old favorite in the middle of a lot of complicated projects.

This happened to be the first project finished after I installed a backdrop over my photobooth.  The booth itself is great in a lot of ways but the staining came out more orange than I'd expected and that's always bugged me.  I'm not a huge fan of how the background affects the color in the photos.  This new backdrop will take some experimenting but I'm hoping it'll solve that particular problem.

Matching Custom Bracelets

I don't do jewelry/accessories too often but it was a fun challenge to design a pair of bracelets to meet the client's specs and budget.  In hindsight I think it might've been ok to use a thicker leather but I'm pretty content with how these came out.