This Is A Scale Harness That I'll Be Bringing To Nauticon In A Couple Weeks.

This is a scale harness that I'll be bringing to Nauticon in a couple weeks.

Nauticon is a convention that I'm excited to be selling things at. And if I don't come back from it with entertaining stories, something will be very wrong. It is a 3-day long, 21-plus, viking themed fandom convention in P-Town. (For people not from the Boston area, Provincetown is a very gay resort town at the tip of Cape Cod.) I expect it to be glorious. If you're free May 2-4, I heartily encourage you to attend.

I have a couple more harnesses that I'll probably be posting pictures of in the next couple days. Once the convention is over I'll probably put them up for order on my Etsy page. (I'm waiting because if I posted them now and they sold immediately, I would really want to remake them before the convention.)

I made a couple new leather notebook covers. The first one I made was a bit overly fancy, with a bunch of stitch-work on the covers, so these are more straightforward. I'm using Moleskine notebooks for the insides because they're nice, and they're freely available.

The Celtic knot pattern is cut all the way through to expose the cardstock of the blank journal inside. It's up for sale over on my Etsy shop.

The interrobang is engraved into the surface of the leather. This one I made just for myself. (The interrobang is definitely my favorite punctuation mark.) As photographed the notebook has been in and out of my pocket and backpack for a couple weeks. So it's holding up pretty nicely.

I'm liking this concept, and would like to make more if it looks like they'll sell. If people have any requests for different types of patterns to do on these, let me know!

Aaaaalllmost done with this scale shirt commission. I successfully moved the closure so that it angles down from the neck to the armpit, then goes straight down the side where it's not very visible. Getting that diagonal overlap to look reasonable was tricky, but I'm happy with how it ended up.

All that's left is to reinforce the neck edge, trim the bottom edge, add in a slit on the left side, and check the fit on the person it's for. (Luckily they're almost exactly my size, so I don't expect to have to adjust it too hard.)

Detail shots of the previous scale dragon tail. There's a bit of laser-engraving on two scales--the name of the character this tail is representing, plus an insignia the commissioner uses. I use the same laser cutters to do this engraving as I use to cut my leather designs.

Also showing some close-up shots of the spade tip. This one was a diamond-shaped tip. It's made of leather, which I laser-cut, stain, and sew together by hand. In between the two exterior layers are more leather pieces shaped to give the final tip a bit of dimensionality and bulk.

You can also see the way in which the spade tip gets attached with three lobster clasps, which means the tips are easily removable. Those last photos were taken before I attached the spikes in.

These leather fortune cookies are unreasonably entertaining to me. The natural color of the leather, especially, is almost exactly the right tone to match actual fortune cookies.

In the future I will probably work out a template and actually print the fortunes, but for now they're just carefully hand-lettered. Also, I want to come up with different "flavors" of fortune, ranging from sincere to surreal.

As it turns out, leather was not quite my first idea for this. I initially thought of making them out of acrylic plastic. If you heat up acrylic to about 300°F, it softens, and you can shape it. It would end up with a clear (or colored) cookie shape, and you'd just have to be very firm in your conviction to break it open and get the fortune out. I may still do that, but in general I think leather is a more friendly material for this.

Oh, and by the way, this can serve as a menu for all the standard leather stain colors I have. (Though the gold was acrylic paint.)

This is just a spade tip to go along with a dragon tail. This one was ordered by someone who wants to make their own tail, similar to the ones I make, and wanted me to make a tip for the tail. I hope the project goes well for them.

I'm showing two slightly different angles, one with more reflections than the other. As usual, it's laser-cut leather which I stitched together by hand. It was finished with a bronze-colored acrylic paint, and is rather shiny. Also a bit brighter than I'd expected.

For more info on dragon tail commissions, check out my wall of text informational page on them!