Commissions Announcement

Commissions Announcement

Recent months have been very hectic for me. I’ve been more stressed than is good for me. My real-person job has had a lot of spikes in workload, and this has worn me out. I have not been able to work on crafting nearly as much as I would have liked to.

Because of these factors, I am going to temporarily close my commission queue. That is, I won’t be accepting new requests for custom commissions. I will work on projects already on my queue until I finish them all. If you have already contacted me (even if I haven’t been able to get back to you yet), I will consider you to already be on the queue.

I also need to take time to work on some of my own ideas for new designs. I need to design things regularly, or else I get sad.

My hope is that I can finish all the things on my queue within 2-4 months. After that, I will open up again for new commissions.

I was wondering if you have a pattern that I can follow to make one myself. I will really appreciate it.

I don’t really have a pattern to give that really fully explains how to make a tail. I suggest learning to make chainmail first, then attacking it once you’re comfortable with doing some moderately complex things. I think tackling a project without having plans laid out ahead of time really forces you to learn lots of things and improve your skills. I do have a couple links that might help though.

Here’s a progression of me building a tail. It’s not really a step-by-step tutorial, but if you’re comfortable with chainmail you ought to be able to work on it for a while and fill in most of the gaps.

Here’s a template for planning out a pattern of different colors of scales.

I did it. I just ordered a laser cutter.

There’s this company called Glowforge that’s made a new consumer-level laser cutter, and after a year or so of hearing whispers about it they have now released it for pre-order. 

The specs are totally reasonable. 40 Watt CO2 laser, 12x20 inch cutting bed. They’re doing a lot of fancy stuff with a cloud-based driver, like optically locating your material and registering your artwork onto it. A lot of that stuff is pretty darn cool, but I probably won’t use much of that functionality. In the end it probably won’t quite negate my need to go in and rent time on the big cutters at the laser store, but I’ll be able to produce lot of my designs quickly and easily without paying someone else. And it’ll make prototyping super easy.

The retail price they’ve set for the cutter is $4000, but for the rest of their pre-order period they’re offering it at HALF OFF. Which is freaking awesome. If you too want a laser cutter of your very own, go check them out before the end of the week!

But wait there’s more! If you use my referral link: http://glowforge.com/referred/?kid=6N3AV you’ll get an extra $100 off the discounted price, and I’ll also get $100 back! If you use my link to buy a cutter I’ll send you a pile of sweet laser-cuttable designs that I’ve made that you can cut for yourself!

This dragon tail is available for immediate sale over here on my Etsy shop. This is an unusual occurrence, so if you’d like it, grab it while you can! I can ship it immediately, so it can get to you by Halloween.

Made in anodized aluminum with red mottled stripes over a black background. It’s 35 inches long and weighs in at just under 3 pounds.

(This tail was a second copy of a tail made for a commissioner. The post office lost the package in Ohio, so I made a replacement to send to the commissioner. Then the original package was recovered and returned to me. So now it’s here for you!)

[edit] Sold! Thanks for playing!

I have a quick question, since I can't seem to find it anywhere on your blog, how much would a tail be? Yours are absolutely beautiful and if I can save up enough in a few months I may commission one! :D

The base price for my dragon tails is $250. Certain materials and add-on options can increase the price, or getting a shorter one can reduce the price. 

I have a page with lots of info on commissioning a tail over here. There’s a link at the top of the page, and I try to link to it when I post photos of tails.

At the moment, I’ve had to close my commission queue while I clear through a lot of outstanding orders and a bunch of other life things. I expect to be able to open up for commissions again before the end of the year.

Also, just a general note, it’s really hard to reply personally when people send messages anonymously.

Some quick chainmail jewelry that I shipped out yesterday. I managed to snag these photos during a break in the rain and posed the pieces in my plants. The second one even has that nice Hipsterchat filter effect from it being so humid my lens was fogging up.

As always, you can find these designs for sale on my Etsy page!