Ooh Look Another Dragon Tail!

Ooh look another dragon tail!

This month was worse for working than I’d hoped, so my commissions are behind schedule, but here’s the first one!

The client drew up this pattern themselves, and I thought it was super pretty. It’s red on top with gold/yellow underbelly, a sequence of Vs in bronze/brown, and a single yellow scale at the peak of each V in the front, which turned out to pop really well.

This one measures in at 33 inches long, and 3 pounds even. It’s got a lobster clasp at the tip.

Glow-in-the-dark tentacle collar! This project has been sitting on my back burner for way too long, it’s finally time to put it out into the world. The design was a scaled-up version of a bracelet design I made quite a while ago, substituting a buckle for a snap.

The fancy thing I set out to do here was to paint the suckers with glow-in-the-dark acrylic, then stain the leather over that, so the paint acted as a resist for the stain, leaving it lighter than the surrounding leather. I did that with a base coat of green, then on top of that all painted blue and green interference paints to give it an iridescence.

The issue was that the suckers on the tips of the tentacles are freaking tiny! It took a lot of concentration to paint them accurately. Then I had to do like 4 coats to get a thick even coating of paint to make the glow look good. It took hours and hours of really eye-crossing up-close work.

I do like this idea rather a lot, but if I’m going to make another I’ll need to re-draw the design with bigger tentacle details so I don’t drive myself crazy with the painting. So this particular collar will remain a unique one-off.

If you’d like it, drop me an offer. I’ll probably post it up on Etsy in a few days, but that’ll take coming up with a price that both seems fair to me and isn’t way too high for the customer.

4-5 oz vegetable-tanned leather, laser-cut and etched, nickel-plated buckle and rivets, water-based leather stain, acrylic paints.

I decided to make something festive this year. I found somewhere to get a whole bunch of sleigh bells, and I made a reindeer harness! For reindeer! Definitely!

These were photos I took while making it. It took 2 evenings, with a day to dry out in the middle. (I soaked the straps to form them around the rings and buckles so they’d sit really nicely.) I used some pretty thick and stiff 8-ounce vegetable-tanned leather, so the straps have a nice heft to them, even before adding a couple pounds of bells on.

The one thing that I’m a bit unhappy with was the pop rivets to attach the bells to the leather. They worked great, and they seem like they’ll be strong and long-lasting, but on a bunch of them they left a bit of a scratchy point pointing in towards your skin. That might end up being uncomfortable when wearing it, though I wasn’t really able to test that since I was finishing this up late at night and I didn’t want to bother my housemates with more noise than was strictly necessary.

In just a moment I’ll post up a couple shots of me wearing it. I got this done the night before flying out of town for Christmas, so no nice photos yet, just phone-camera selfies, but oh well.

Link to photos of it being worn.

A pair of extra-wide scale bracelets for a couple’s wedding. Both anodized aluminum, one purple and one blue.

Quick update, commissions opening soon.

I’ve been super busy for the last... while... so haven’t been able to devote as much time as I’d like to crafting. My normal-job work has been super busy with us scrambling to finish a set of construction drawings for this (actually really neat I think) roof addition. We just yesterday sent out (what I believe to be) the final set of drawings. Then in the evenings I’ve been working really hard to finish writing a LARP that we’re running tomorrow.

Next week I’m going to be attempting to power through a costume for the @magicmeatmarch challenge. I’m not yet sure what direction I’m going to take for it, so if you’ve got ideas for a costume I should make let me know! The first year I made a stack of armor pieces, and the second I did a sort of rogue get-up where I made a leather jacket. I’m kind of thinking about doing like an evil spell-caster or necromancer thing, with a bunch of black strap work in pentagram shapes and stuff. Something to take the bondage-harness aesthetic but reconfigure it into something more fantastical.

After that project is done, my queue of big projects will be pretty much taken care of! So I’ll be opening up for tail commissions! I’ve had a bunch of people contact me over the last few months asking about them. (I’ve occasionally been too busy to even respond to those requests, so my apologies to those folks.) People who’ve submitted tail requests in previous rounds will get first dibs, but I’ll be posting the official opening announcement next week.

I’ve been wearing this leather cuff most days since this last Halloween, so 8 months now. It’s the same pattern as this one, but finished with lots of neatsfoot oil instead of a matte acrylic clear coat like I typically do. The neatsfoot oil darkened the leather significantly over the span of a couple weeks, but it’s been pretty much unchanged since then. Originally the two sides of the bracelet were light green like this one, and un-dyed plain tan leather. The light green dye didn’t look very green anymore once the oil darkened it, so that’s probably not a combination I would repeat in the future, unless I specifically wanted this kind of earthy vaguely-green light brown. (Which would work in certain aesthetics.)