Haha Business - Tumblr Posts

I just got trash talked and I had to share.

I got someone talking shit about my chainmail in a personal note over on Etsy, and I ended up writing way too involved a response. I probably should’ve just responded with “How about you go order a steaming plate of Go Fuck Yourself to go.” But I was in A Mood, so I wrote like a whole essay about my standards and priorities as a craftsperson. And I kind of like to share those sorts of things publicly from time to time, so here you go. If anyone else would like to send some trash talk at me, feel free to try your luck.

[Redacted]:

www.etsy.com/listing/78305616/european-6-in-1-bracelet-stainless-steel

with all your talk about precision lasers and whatnot, what explains the presence of pinch-cut rings on your pieces, the ugliest and least precise way of producing jump rings (never mind the gaps and bad closure i see)?

Hi [Redacted].

You seem angry about this. I'll try to address the different points you brought up:

• I'm not drawn to laser cutters because of some fetishization of precision. I'm drawn to them because they allow me to make things that would not be possible otherwise. But laser cutters and chainmail have basically nothing to do with each other, so that's a whole different conversation.

• When crafting items to sell, there is a balance one must find between the time put in and the price a customer will pay for it. With chainmail, a customer may notice sloppy work if the rings are not closed in-plane and they scratch a bit. But once you're at an acceptable solid level of quality, there's no reason to put in extra anguish if it doesn't improve the customer's experience of the product. Put simply, it's not about absolute perfection, it's about efficiency and managing your standards.

• I don't consider the shear-cut rings I use to be ugly. People on chainmail forums may deride them and extol on the virtues of saw-cut rings, but honestly I don't mind them. As a matter of principle, I'm totally fine seeing evidence of how an item was made, and that's how I think of the pinching at the shear points of these rings.

• Back when I started chainmail I was hand-wrapping and cutting rings with wire cutters. Sometimes I would slip up and get some variations in ring sizes, but I was pretty accurate at cutting straight along the coil to produce pretty consistently-sized rings. But as soon as I started selling stuff, I switched to buying pre-cut rings from The Ring Lord, and I've never detected any variation in size between rings. Their manufacturing tolerances are good.

• Also, saw-cut rings are more expensive than shear-cut rings, and I don't think they're worth it.

• The vast majority of the chainmail I make is larger costume pieces, usually with scales, where the rings aren't even visible. There's no reason to use saw-cut for those. I sell a decent number of the small scale bracelets, but I sell very few ring-mail jewelry pieces. Even if I did want saw-cut rings for jewelry, for the amount that I'd use them, it's really not worth stocking them.

• A couple times I did get some saw-cut rings. What I found was that they were more prone to being scratchy. The metal at the cut point on the shear-cut rings is bent inwards a bit, so the joint is rounded over. But the edge of the saw cut is sharp, so a minuscule error in closure is immediately evident because it scratches. And even if your closures are perfect, sometimes the rings have little burs poking out parallel with the cut, which will scratch no matter how long you spend exquisitely closing your rings. That sucked, and I didn't order saw-cut rings again after that.

• My closures are fine. I hold myself to a pretty high standard when I close rings. If the ring isn't springing closed, pushing itself to close harder than flush, I worry that a scale will eventually force its way in and open it up. I've never had that happen, but that's why I'm careful.

• When I see other chainmail people at craft fairs, I silently judge their closures. I'm frequently disappointed. The worst disappointment was a guy who sells lots of ring mail at a fantasy convention that's in Boston every year. He uses like 12 gauge 1/2" diameter aluminum rings. Really big. And he will boast about working out a fast method of opening and closing rings with only one pair of pliers. But his closures are shit. None of the rings touch themselves, some of them there's up to like 1/16 inch of a gap. But you know what? He sells big armor pieces. Nobody is looking at them that closely. They're closed well enough that there isn't a danger of rings slipping loose. It's not affecting the function or appearance of his product. It doesn't matter.

I'm assuming you're learning chainmail yourself. A layperson wouldn't have the vocabulary, and someone who had been doing it for a long time would have more tact. My advice to you is to keep looking at other people's work and thinking of how you could do better. That's how you improve. Think of what matters to you, what you want to optimize, what you want to explore. Myself, I care about making an impact with unique designs, especially with larger costume pieces. Some people really love working really small, making micro mail with tweezers. Some people are drawn to ornament, mixing weaves together with lots of draping chains. If you're drawn towards perfection of technique, maybe you'd want to make high price-point pieces in precious metals, maybe even exploring soldering each ring closed. When you have a goal or direction in mind, you can fit your own methods to that goal. And you realize that other people have different priorities, different optimizations.

Oh, and it may please you to know that in the full decade that I've been making chainmail, I truly cannot think of another person before you who has trash talked my work. Congratulations on being the first.

Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions!

-Jesse                                            

Thankfully the Powers That Be agreed that I’m not a porn blog. So I’m no longer in time-out.

I’m relieved I guess, but man, this was a frustration that I Did Not Need. I’m getting tired of neural nets being fickle arbiters of whether or not I get to have a landing page for my crafting business.

I could sort of understand an argument that the auto-moderation system shouldn’t explain why it decided that a blog was porn, because that could give hints into the workings of the system, and the porn bot ecosystem would use that info to game the system. But I think the human users of a site do deserve explanations when things are decided about them. I got 2 politely-worded automatic responses about this matter. If the person whose job it is to review fifty of these cases every hour had clicked the wrong button? Would I have had any recourse?

Anyway, at very minimum, the system should have sent an alert to me when I got flagged. The best I can narrow it down is sometime between October 4, the last post I made where things were normal; and 11, the next post I made, when I noticed my avatar was the default cone. No email, no alert anywhere on the website.

In case it wasn’t clear, I’m grumpy. But I have a stack of new stuff to post, so I’ll get back to that tomorrow.

Wait fuck did I get fucking flagged as a porn blog

what the fuck tumblr

seriously?

This last weekend I was in the dealers’ den at Anthro New England. It was my first time vending at a furry convention, and it went pretty well! I sold a bunch of masks, took a couple tail commissions, and got some art from neighbor vendors.

Between this and Arisia last month, it was good to get some insight into which sorts of things in my line of products resonate with people in those contexts. The most popular things for catching peoples’ eyes were the robot dragon drone hood, scale tail, and pet rocks; while the things that sold the quickest were the raven skull masks, scale mail bracelets, and leather fortune cookies.

I’ll definitely be looking into more conventions and other venues to sell stuff at. The big challenge will be logistics--since I don’t have a car (it’s way more trouble than it’s worth when living in Boston), getting myself to non-local cons will require making better friends with people who go places and carpooling. (Or I guess learning to drive and renting a car, but that’s even more expenses.)

I’ll also need to think about how to diversify my product range, because it’s definitely true that only a relatively small minority of people will actually buy a mask, even if they really like it. So I may resume working on everyday-carry sorts of things, like the notebook covers I’ve done in the past. I’d kinda like to do more leather bracelets again, but last time I had them at a con I only sold like 2 of them, so that didn’t seem to be a winner.

I’ll also be looking into cons with art shows, because I think the big hoods may have a better chance at selling in that sort of context.

Anyway, things were fairly successful on the whole, and over the next couple months  I’ll be mulling over how to improve more.

I decided to do a flash sale for Black Friday--everything on my Etsy store is 20% off through 11/30!

https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheArmoredDragon

I thought about doing a fun gimmick like only black items are on sale, but actually I want to make more colorful things right now, so I just went for black promo pieces and put everything on sale.

Not the best photos, but I wanted to show what my table at Anthro New England looked like!

The convention went extremely well. Selling by myself the whole weekend was very tiring, but I was so excited to show all the new things I’d made in the last 2 years.

Closeup photo is of my shitpost corner. The pet rocks are classics that I always like to make. The slap bracelets I worked out specifically for this convention, because the theme was The 90s.

I so badly want to Blaze my slap bracelets, I think this is the content that Tumblr deserves to be subjected to. But I’ve got a LARP to run in 2 weeks and I don’t have the time to spare to make more if it worked and I got a bunch of orders.

Do you sell your dragon tails that I saw over on Deviantart?

I still make them on commission basis, but can only do so during periods of time when I've got few other obligations (and am not working on another new large design at the same time).

I had intended to take a batch of orders during August, but my day job turned out to not have as quiet a patch as I'd anticipated, and some family stuff came up that also got in the way. This month crafting is taking a back seat to a LARP writing project. I'm still itching to work on big chainmail stuff again, so I'm hoping that I'll be able to make a batch sometime during the fall, but I can't say exactly when that will be.

tl;dr Yes, but life has been hectic.

Chainmail price adjustment incoming

I just ordered like a year's worth of chainmail supplies and woof, some of the prices went up a bunch in the last year. On top of that, I'm finally caving and switching to more expensive saw-cut rings for a lot of products. (I got a whole rant on that, I actually used to prefer the machine-cut rings, but I think the quality slipped in recent years, and now it takes a lot more care and time to close rings so they're not scratchy, but before that quality change they shit I gotta stop the rant now.)

Upshot is, I'll need to adjust a bunch of my prices soon, so order now to get stuff at old pricing.

Good news is I stocked a good set of colors in a new ring size, so I'll have some fun new stuff coming down in the next few weeks.

Here's some photos of my table setup from Anthro New England, finally getting around to posting them.

I had 2 nearly totally separate table setups, actually--one from the regular dealers' den, and one from the 18+ night market. The daytime table had all my masks and jewelry, the after-dark one had mostly collars and codpieces, with the big hoods and a couple harnesses thrown in for good measure.

The convention was my most successful one to date, but I aim to do even better in the future!

hey !! do you do commissions? i have a really vivid image of a mask/muzzle i want but i cant find anything close to it. can i send you the details and get a rough estimate on the price?

Commissions for new designs are a sometimes food.

I'm always happy to talk and think about a design idea, but I can't always promise that I can bring it to life. Some ideas require materials or methods that I'm not practiced at. Some just don't work with the materials I use. But more broadly, designing a new thing takes a long time, and it's hard to predict just how long it'll be. Sometimes I'll descend into the CAD dimension for a day and come out the other side with a design I'm happy with; sometimes I'll look at it the next day and decide that it sucks and I need to redo it all. So when starting a project, it can sometimes be hard to give a fair quote for how much work it'll take.

That said, if it's an idea that I think I can make in a fair amount of time, I do sometimes take custom commissions. Especially if the idea is one that I could tweak a bit to get a good generic product for future sale.

(Decided to answer publicly because this is a question I get a lot.)