Tiny Top Hat! Always A Delight To Make. I Was Super Happy That I Had One Made When We Did This Photo

Tiny top hat! Always a delight to make. I was super happy that I had one made when we did this photo shoot. I think I’d made it the day before, and shipped it out to the customer the next day. 

Do not eat that mushroom.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/175158885/mini-leather-top-hat

Grabbed a few photos of a couple masks while out in the woods taking photos of a big project. These weren’t new designs, but they are in new colors. (I’m still sorting through the photos for the big project, but a hint, it’s this one.)

We’ve got a rainbow geometric/mechanical oni/robot thing, horned headband with silver horns, and a mesh/screen mask in yellow-green.

Leather dragon costume! Matching set of head and tail! I’m very excited, this project was many months in the making. 

Aesthetically I was aiming for something sort of halfway in between a fursuit and kink gear. I think the black leather and rivets pull the image pretty strongly towards the latter, giving it a sleek and somewhat sinister vibe.

It’s a hollow shell, not built on a resin or foam base. The leather used is a somewhat firm but flexible chrome re-tanned one, with a very clean semi-glossy finish.

The head has enough space to be worn over glasses! You can see mine in some of the photos. The eyes are clear acrylic, giving a pretty good unobstructed field of vision. The horns are birch plywood laminated together into a solid form. The head opens in the back and laces closed with nylon paracord. The tail is stuffed with poly-fill, and held on with a pair of belt loops.

I designed everything in 3D in Rhino. Because the pieces were pretty big I actually hand-cut all the leather pieces rather than laser-cutting them as I often do. (The plywood for the horns was laser-cut.) You can see some of that process here.

And of utmost importance, this is up for sale! Here’s the Etsy link! If it sells I’ll get to make a new one and try out more new ideas!

LOOK UPON MY LASERS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR.

So last Thursday I got a call in the middle of the day from the vendor coordinator at Arisia. I’d been wait-listed back in the fall, I may have mentioned previously. They’d had someone cancel, though, and would I like to take the table on a week’s notice?

So that’s been my week basically. I used up the leather I’d had on hand very quickly, though I was able to squeeze way more masks than I’d expected out of my scrap pile. Today a fresh hide of leather finally arrived, and this pile is what I’ve cut out of it so far.

Half a day on the laser cutter. If I didn’t have this thing, there’s no way I would be able to get this sort of volume made in time. Sometimes that just hits me hard. Next is staining and forming them up, so we’ll see how quick I can get that done.

Back when I was frantically prepping to vend at Arisia in January, I put some time in to make glasses-compatible versions of more of my mask designs. They all sold, so I'll have to make new copies in order to get usable photos of them that I can put up on Etsy, but in the meantime here's the selfies I grabbed.

Why even have friends if they're not gonna photobomb your products.

Realized I still had more photos to go through from that shoot in the fall. Here's a fox mask with big huge ears.

Aaaaand I updated the listing on Etsy!