Do You Happen To Have Anything Ready To Go In Blue/purple And White? I Would Be Looking For Something

Do you happen to have anything ready to go in blue/purple and white? I would be looking for something for my daughter... we're both hardcore larpers and she plays a drake. Fell in love with your product, but she's being cautious about purchasing something prior to seeing the completed product (we've been burned BADLY before). Let me know, your stuff is gorgeous!!

I’m assuming you’re asking about a tail? Those take long enough to make that it makes no sense to craft them ahead of time to have in stock. I make them on a commission basis when my work schedule permits. 

I feel you on not wanting to pay for something sight unseen. When I take commissions, I only take payment after the piece is completed and I’ve posted photos for the client to see. It means the client gets proof of completion before they pay. A couple times I’ve had clients back out at that point, citing lack of money, but in those cases I’ve always been able to sell the tail pretty quickly to someone else. So I’m generally fine with this setup.

I’m currently preeeetty busy, sadly, and can’t take commissions right now. When I am able to take orders I’ll post announcements here.

Also, I guess I should probably put together a contact form that asks for people’s emails. As is, people tend to ask pretty specific questions anonymously, and there’s no way to respond except by typing out a politic answer and blasting it to all my followers, which is annoying for everyone involved.

Ooh look another dragon tail!

This month was worse for working than I’d hoped, so my commissions are behind schedule, but here’s the first one!

The client drew up this pattern themselves, and I thought it was super pretty. It’s red on top with gold/yellow underbelly, a sequence of Vs in bronze/brown, and a single yellow scale at the peak of each V in the front, which turned out to pop really well.

This one measures in at 33 inches long, and 3 pounds even. It’s got a lobster clasp at the tip.

Dragon tail commissions open!

After a very long period of being super busy with lots of things, I am finally able to open for tail commissions! I will be taking requests for commissions through Thursday April 5. Commissions I accept at this time will be completed by the end of April. Read up on the details here, and then fill out this form! Note that I do expect to get more requests than I will be able to complete at this time. I don't like taking commissions on a first-come-first-serve basis, since that just seems to privilege people who're online all the time. I try to be fair when I pick which commissions to take, and people who request one now but who don't make it will have priority in the future.

And here’s the anodized titanium dragon tail I was working on! I was super happy to get a chance to work with this metal again. Getting these takes putting in a special order to the manufacturer, and there’s always variability between batches, but it’s totally worth it. (There was a bit of a snafu getting started with this one because paying taxes had drained my bank account, and I didn’t have the cash to be able to put in the order for the scales until I had finished another commission... Anyway, it eventually worked out.)

This one also has a funky tip, which took rather a while to work out the specific dimensions on. The upper part goes clear through the tail, and the tail is slitted to provide the space for it. Like my normal spade tips, it attaches in to the tail with lobster clasps, so it’s removable. I’m pretty adamant about doing it like that, because I know that the materials I use for the tips will wear down more easily than the metal of the tail, so I want to make sure they can be easily replaced by the owner without needing to ship the whole thing back to me to take apart the chainmail. 

Oh right, this tail also used a different style of spikes than I normally use. These are shaped like eagle claws. I rather like the side view of them, but for some reason they’ve got a strong twist to the side, which I was not a big fan of. The client liked it, though, so that’s fine.

The scales are all anodized titanium, primarily a mix of light blue and dark blue, with a pattern of violet diamonds down the spine and a scattering of teal and green on the top side. Spade tip is Baltic birch plywood with black acrylic paint. It measures in at 35 inches long with the spade tip, 33 inches without. It weighs 3 pounds 11 ounces.

Glow-in-the-dark tentacle collar! This project has been sitting on my back burner for way too long, it’s finally time to put it out into the world. The design was a scaled-up version of a bracelet design I made quite a while ago, substituting a buckle for a snap.

The fancy thing I set out to do here was to paint the suckers with glow-in-the-dark acrylic, then stain the leather over that, so the paint acted as a resist for the stain, leaving it lighter than the surrounding leather. I did that with a base coat of green, then on top of that all painted blue and green interference paints to give it an iridescence.

The issue was that the suckers on the tips of the tentacles are freaking tiny! It took a lot of concentration to paint them accurately. Then I had to do like 4 coats to get a thick even coating of paint to make the glow look good. It took hours and hours of really eye-crossing up-close work.

I do like this idea rather a lot, but if I’m going to make another I’ll need to re-draw the design with bigger tentacle details so I don’t drive myself crazy with the painting. So this particular collar will remain a unique one-off.

If you’d like it, drop me an offer. I’ll probably post it up on Etsy in a few days, but that’ll take coming up with a price that both seems fair to me and isn’t way too high for the customer.

4-5 oz vegetable-tanned leather, laser-cut and etched, nickel-plated buckle and rivets, water-based leather stain, acrylic paints.

I had two dragon tail commissions in a row that involved non-standard spade tips. Normally I do them horizontal/flat, in whale-fluke orientation. For this tail though the client wanted a vertical shark-fin orientation. I turned out to rather like it! 

The other sort of funky thing about this tail is thankfully impossible to see. The purple scales scattered throughout are anodized titanium, which is a harder metal than the aluminum. I usually try to avoid mixing metals of different hardnesses, because the softer one will tend to get scratched up relatively faster. So to mitigate this problem, I cut a little scale out of suede to weave in beneath each titanium scale, as padding to prevent it from touching the aluminum scales below it. Maaaybe overkill, maaaybe more time consumptive than it was worth, but hey, it won’t scratch itself now.

Primarily made of anodized aluminum, red on top with an orange underbelly. Speckled through the red are some purple anodized titanium scales. It measures 29 inches from tip to belt line without the spade tip, 34 inches with it on. It weighs in at 2 pounds 14 ounces.

Pics of the other tail I’m finishing will be up tomorrow.