Did I Never Post This? It Looks Like I Never Posted This.

Did I never post this? It looks like I never posted this.

These are the Tiny sized scales from The Ring Lord. I got a pack or two to experiment with. And man they’re pretty, but man they’re not for me. They take forever. Where the typical bracelets I make take about 2 dozen scales, the same length of tiny scales takes about a hundred scales. And the tiny rings were super tedious to work with.

Basically, for the amount of time it takes to make something with these tiny scales, I don’t think I can sell them at a price that I think someone would pay. Though if I ever end up starting to work with precious metals, I’d use these.

These ones are “frost” colored anodized aluminum. The size comparison is green anodized titanium.

This dragon tail has a golden flame pattern to it. Made of anodized aluminum scales, mostly yellow/gold with some orange and red. And it has a spade tip made of fluorescent orange acrylic plastic.

It measures in at 32 inches long without the spade tip, 35 with it, and weighs 2 lbs 15 oz.

I’d fallen a bit behind, but nearly finished up March’s commissions in time. I’ve got 2 more tails incoming.

Leather outfit I made for Magic Meat Week back in November, and I did post it then, but didn’t get nicer photos until more recently. So it’s going up for @magicmeatmarch! I was trying to go for a dark rogue/thief sort of aesthetic, but I think it needs some sort of asymmetric holster/strap arrangement to really sell the look. Something to stick a dagger, or a bunch of smoke bombs, or what have you.

I’m pretty busy this month with a pile of commissions, but I’ve got a few days of waiting at the moment to get more materials in, so maybe I’ll be able to work on that now. I’m a bit low on ideas too, though, so if anyone has an idea for how the straps should go to maximize the beefcakiness of this getup, feel free to scribble your thoughts on one of these photos and shoot it back to me!

Just a werewolf mask someone bought off of my Etsy. It’s not my favorite of my designs, but it does fit with glasses! While I was in laser-cutting it I also cut a new simple mask design that’s also made to fit with glasses like this one. I need to get some photos of it tomorrow.

The one thing that I always notice when doing these is that when the space between the eyeholes is removed, it ends up making the whole mask a lot trickier to form to shape. This one ended up needing to be re-moistened and adjusted because it dried a bit too splayed outwards.

I also realized that I’m sometimes inconsistent about how I form the ears. Oh well.

I’ve been re-learning to code! Here are some spiral experiments I was toying with.

I use Rhino for all my 3D modeling at work and for crafting, and the most recent update to the Mac version brought in a Python scripting environment. Back in college I’d done some stuff in Visual Basic (which was what Rhino had available at the time), and had made some fun stuff, but I hadn’t been able to do much of that nature for a few years.

I’ve been working through some tutorials to get the hang of the language, but this little guy is the first thing I coded on my own in Python. Basically it just takes a starting object, rotates it around an origin by the golden angle (137.5°), scales it by a percentage, drops out a copy and then repeats. I was inspired by work by John Edmark at Stanford who makes 3D printed spiraling blooming sculptures that animate. So for the 3D versions I added a rotation of the spiraled object as a basic variation to toy with. For the near future I’ll probably just use the flat version to cut or engrave patterns into surfaces, but who knows, maybe I’ll have some ideas I’m excited about enough to have them 3D printed.

For people who’re curious, here’s the short little script I wrote that does the spiraling, rotating the spiraled object, and also alternates between 3 colors. If you’ve got Rhino, feel free to copy it, modify it, make your own stuff using it, whatever you like. It’s not very clean code anyway. Code after the break:

import rhinoscriptsyntax as rs

obj = rs.GetObjects("Pick objects to spiral-array.") cen = rs.GetPoint("Pick center point.") rep = rs.GetInteger("How many copies?") scale = rs.GetReal("Pick a scale factor (ideally close to 1.0)")

phi = 137.508 #that's the golden angle. def spiral(input, center, angle, scale, i):    if i == 0:        rs.CopyObjects(input)    temp = rs.RotateObjects(input, center, angle)    temp = rs.ScaleObjects(temp, center, [scale,scale,scale])    output = rs.CopyObjects(temp)    #output the un-modified template, fed to the next iteration.    #then start to modify it according to the iteration number.    #each iteration's modified version is just dropped from temp.    cenpoint = rs.SurfaceAreaCentroid(input)    temp = rs.RotateObjects(input, cenpoint[0], i*2)    if i%3 == 0:        rs.ObjectColor(temp,[255,0,0])    elif i%3 == 1:        rs.ObjectColor(temp,[0,255,0])    else:        rs.ObjectColor(temp, [0,0,255])    return output #pass it a template object, do the scaling and moving to that object, #and pass it to the next step, but to modify the individual seeds, just #tweak and drop out the objects without worrying too much about keeping #track of them.

working = obj for i in range(0, rep):    working = spiral(working, cen, phi, scale, i)

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