This Is The 3rd (I Think) Version Of This Mask Ive Made. Ive Been Haunted By Some Fit Issues, And Just

This is the 3rd (I think) version of this mask I’ve made. I’ve been haunted by some fit issues, and just now I think I figured out the solution. If your face is larger (like mine) the cheekbones press the end of the mask outwards a bit, which ends up opening the mouth in a way that I didn’t intend. The expression was designed as more of a lips-closed smirk.

For the next one I think I can fix the issue for good.

Made a new dragon muzzle mask! I used a new green dye on this one, and for the first time I am Extremely pleased with it.

I've put it up on my Etsy! This one is available for immediate shipping, but as usual I can also do other color combinations made-to-order.

Here’s a few scale bracelets made as take-home orders from ANE, back in January. The bi pride flag one with the stripes in the long direction was a bit of fun. The light blue on on the one with lots of colors was a color I got specifically to be able to do the trans flag better, but someone at the con really liked it as its own color.

A set of bracelets in different rainbow patterns. Made with anodized aluminum and rubber rings, so they stretch over your hand. Available over on my Etsy shop, as per usual!

This has definitely become my favorite codpiece design. I made this version to have in stock for ANE earlier this year, when I wanted to have a variety of colors shown. I went for the same color combination as I used for the costume that this design originated with - seen here.

It's available over on my Etsy. I'd love to make it in more colors for people, too!

how did you first get into making this stuff? do you enjoy it?

There's a lot of possible answers here.

For a couple years after college, I worked at a laser engraving and cutting shop. Leather was a material we knew we could cut, but nobody ever asked for it, so I looked up some basic info and put together some masks as demo pieces. Then I got fired for unrelated reasons, but decided to keep going with the masks on my own. A decade later, I’m still going.

I've always enjoyed making things. The focused calm of working a craft, the challenge of finding the problems that need solving, followed by the satisfaction of holding in your hands something that hadn't exited before. It’s hard to beat that feeling. If you haven’t done it for a while, I highly recommend making a habit of it.

Sometime in college I realized that if I kept making things just for myself, I would eventually run out of both space in my closet and money in my bank account. So I took the best photos I could of what I had, and started posting it up on Etsy.

In high school ceramics class, I had an idea to try and make a flexible dragon skin out of little bits of clay, all glazed differently. I had no idea how to do this. A friend of mine was like "Yo it sounds like you want to look up how to make chainmail for that." She was right.

I work in architecture by day, and the decision to do that was unrelated but definitely related to my crafting obsession. Designing a kitchen, a café, a house, takes months or years of work, most of which is tedious details like picking tile patterns or looking up exactly what order to layer different sealant tapes to make sure the walls are watertight. Designing a crafting project gives me a creative outlet that is immediate. I can sit down for an afternoon and take an idea from a sketch on trace paper, to a final mask formed up out of leather. There's an excitement to that. A reminder that, yes, I can make cool stuff quickly, without needing to sink two years into a project.

For a while I worked to teach myself to draw. I managed to get pretty decent at sketching from life, with a moderate understanding of anatomy and perspective. I liked art, so I thought I wanted to make art. But I struggled with it. If I was drawing something from my imagination, no matter how well I managed to put the lines down on the paper, I would ultimately look at it and just be sad that it didn't exist in the real world. So eventually I gave up on the drawing part, and focused on the part I seemed to actually care about.

I can't envision a version of myself that doesn't make things. I think on some fundamental level, I measure my worth as a person based on what I put forth into the world. I don't know what else to do.

When you decide to turn a hobby into a business, it of course takes some of the delight away. It's no longer something you do when you want to relax and have some fun. It becomes an obligation, to make and ship orders on time, to pack up your stuff and bring it to craft fairs, to track your expenses and file your taxes, to stay on top of the constantly changing social media landscape. But it also lights a fire under your ass. You can't just keep making the same thing you made three years ago–you have to keep making new stuff, keep improving your techniques, keep reaching for new ideas that have never been made before. You lose some of the joy, but you gain a lot of satisfaction.

All through my childhood I filled my closet with little handicrafts kits, that I got as gifts or that caught my eye when following my dad to the art store. Calligraphy, wood carving, weaving looms, boondoggles, spirographs, knitting, crochet, fancy nautical knots, sculpey, and more that I can't remember. After all those different things, I’m so glad that I found a couple specific crafts that really grabbed me, that take enough work to develop expertise, that have expansive enough applications and possibilities, that I could devote a decade or more of my time to focusing on them.

I’d been interested in the furry fandom ever since little fantasy reading teenager me tried looking for stories where the dragons were the main characters, and I found people online who were doing just that. There’s a powerful do-it-yourself attitude that’s baked into the core of the fandom: The world isn’t giving us the art that we want, so we’re going to make it ourselves. I keep having ideas for things that I want, that don’t exist yet. If I want them to exist, I have to be the one to make them.

My dad was a photographer, and I spent many childhood afternoons with him in his darkroom in the basement, delightedly washing negatives, turning them gently over in their canisters of chemicals, sitting still in the dark as Dad unspooled the sensitive film, squinting in the red light as the projected images magically re-emerged on the clean white paper. What could be more amazing, more normal, more right, than having your own little space to work such magic for yourself.

In about 2008 or 9 I ordered my first batch of metal scales, with the idea of trying to make a dragon tail in time for Halloween. It took probably a couple weeks to figure out how to make it, and within a week I had thought of how to do it better and disassembled the entire thing. By the 3rd or 4th time I'd rebuilt it, I thought that it was probably good enough that I wouldn't feel embarrassed to post it online and see if someone might want to buy it.

Of course I love working on these things I make. But I don't think that's exactly why I make them.

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.)