Made A New Dragon Muzzle Mask! I Used A New Green Dye On This One, And For The First Time I Am Extremely

Made a new dragon muzzle mask! I used a new green dye on this one, and for the first time I am Extremely pleased with it.

I've put it up on my Etsy! This one is available for immediate shipping, but as usual I can also do other color combinations made-to-order.

Updated design for my lined collar! I think I'm finally getting the specs on this dialed in properly.

I'm putting it up on my Etsy for continuing sale! It'll be made-to-order generally, unless you happen to be the same size as this one was made to, in which case I can ship it immediately.

how did you first get into making this stuff? do you enjoy it?

There's a lot of possible answers here.

For a couple years after college, I worked at a laser engraving and cutting shop. Leather was a material we knew we could cut, but nobody ever asked for it, so I looked up some basic info and put together some masks as demo pieces. Then I got fired for unrelated reasons, but decided to keep going with the masks on my own. A decade later, I’m still going.

I've always enjoyed making things. The focused calm of working a craft, the challenge of finding the problems that need solving, followed by the satisfaction of holding in your hands something that hadn't exited before. It’s hard to beat that feeling. If you haven’t done it for a while, I highly recommend making a habit of it.

Sometime in college I realized that if I kept making things just for myself, I would eventually run out of both space in my closet and money in my bank account. So I took the best photos I could of what I had, and started posting it up on Etsy.

In high school ceramics class, I had an idea to try and make a flexible dragon skin out of little bits of clay, all glazed differently. I had no idea how to do this. A friend of mine was like "Yo it sounds like you want to look up how to make chainmail for that." She was right.

I work in architecture by day, and the decision to do that was unrelated but definitely related to my crafting obsession. Designing a kitchen, a café, a house, takes months or years of work, most of which is tedious details like picking tile patterns or looking up exactly what order to layer different sealant tapes to make sure the walls are watertight. Designing a crafting project gives me a creative outlet that is immediate. I can sit down for an afternoon and take an idea from a sketch on trace paper, to a final mask formed up out of leather. There's an excitement to that. A reminder that, yes, I can make cool stuff quickly, without needing to sink two years into a project.

For a while I worked to teach myself to draw. I managed to get pretty decent at sketching from life, with a moderate understanding of anatomy and perspective. I liked art, so I thought I wanted to make art. But I struggled with it. If I was drawing something from my imagination, no matter how well I managed to put the lines down on the paper, I would ultimately look at it and just be sad that it didn't exist in the real world. So eventually I gave up on the drawing part, and focused on the part I seemed to actually care about.

I can't envision a version of myself that doesn't make things. I think on some fundamental level, I measure my worth as a person based on what I put forth into the world. I don't know what else to do.

When you decide to turn a hobby into a business, it of course takes some of the delight away. It's no longer something you do when you want to relax and have some fun. It becomes an obligation, to make and ship orders on time, to pack up your stuff and bring it to craft fairs, to track your expenses and file your taxes, to stay on top of the constantly changing social media landscape. But it also lights a fire under your ass. You can't just keep making the same thing you made three years ago–you have to keep making new stuff, keep improving your techniques, keep reaching for new ideas that have never been made before. You lose some of the joy, but you gain a lot of satisfaction.

All through my childhood I filled my closet with little handicrafts kits, that I got as gifts or that caught my eye when following my dad to the art store. Calligraphy, wood carving, weaving looms, boondoggles, spirographs, knitting, crochet, fancy nautical knots, sculpey, and more that I can't remember. After all those different things, I’m so glad that I found a couple specific crafts that really grabbed me, that take enough work to develop expertise, that have expansive enough applications and possibilities, that I could devote a decade or more of my time to focusing on them.

I’d been interested in the furry fandom ever since little fantasy reading teenager me tried looking for stories where the dragons were the main characters, and I found people online who were doing just that. There’s a powerful do-it-yourself attitude that’s baked into the core of the fandom: The world isn’t giving us the art that we want, so we’re going to make it ourselves. I keep having ideas for things that I want, that don’t exist yet. If I want them to exist, I have to be the one to make them.

My dad was a photographer, and I spent many childhood afternoons with him in his darkroom in the basement, delightedly washing negatives, turning them gently over in their canisters of chemicals, sitting still in the dark as Dad unspooled the sensitive film, squinting in the red light as the projected images magically re-emerged on the clean white paper. What could be more amazing, more normal, more right, than having your own little space to work such magic for yourself.

In about 2008 or 9 I ordered my first batch of metal scales, with the idea of trying to make a dragon tail in time for Halloween. It took probably a couple weeks to figure out how to make it, and within a week I had thought of how to do it better and disassembled the entire thing. By the 3rd or 4th time I'd rebuilt it, I thought that it was probably good enough that I wouldn't feel embarrassed to post it online and see if someone might want to buy it.

Of course I love working on these things I make. But I don't think that's exactly why I make them.

This collar is sure to get you melting too.

Made of leather! I shipped this one out to a customer this week.

Here it is on my Etsy! This one used a new purple dye that worked a lot better than the previous one I had, so I also updated the listing photos to reflect that.

I will say, I have still been happily looking at art and shitposts here on the daily. I’m glad my period of burnout lined up with Twitter lighting itself on fire, because it means I just got to log out and not even look at it for a few months. Depending on how that house fire turns out I may need to spin up more social medias when I do come back, and I’m not looking forward to that. But it’s been nice not having to suffer through it.

Still alive!

Just popping in with an update. I had a bad patch of burnout after vending at ANE (though the con itself went great), and I put crafting on the back burner for a couple months. Combination of a lot of life stuff needing my attention, and just not finding crafting enjoyable for a while. I’ve still been shipping out Etsy orders, and I’ve been working on a big commission when I’m able, but I’ve been taking a break from posting and promoting. I needed to reduce my workload.

I’ll be back sometime in the next couple months, but not sure when exactly. I’ve still got a couple life things left to work through. I have been doing a bit more crafting lately, and am glad to be enjoying it again. I’m looking forward to easing back in to making new stuff, and being able to share it again!

A pair of dragon scale bracelets I just finished up. Made all in stainless steel.