I've Been Working On This Scale Maille Shirt Commission For A While, And It's Finally Starting To Look

I've been working on this scale maille shirt commission for a while, and it's finally starting to look like something. When finished it'll be about mid-thigh length. Currently I've got it closing in the front with a few clasps, but I'm likely to adjust it so it clasps on the side where it's less visible.

This is the largest commission I've made so far, and I'm excited about it. I made a scale shirt for myself way back in 2008, and I'm happy that someone finally ordered one.

I made a simple mask for people who wear glasses. Finally! I was worried that the horizontal pieces below the eyes wouldn't work out, but it turns out that they're totally cool and seem to conform to the shape of different people's faces pretty well!

I'm super excited. This one wasn't even laser-cut, I just cut it carefully by hand late at night to see if it would work. But I did draw up the design in CAD, and next time I'm in the laser shop I'm making like 5 of these.

Anyway, I'm so excited about this that I just had to put it up on Etsy already. I'll get fresh photos up pretty soon. If someone buys it quickly, they'll get a fresh, non-hand-cut-late-at-night one. Here it is!

These wooden leaf pendants have been on my mind for a long time. The designs are directly based on real leaves, and they're cut from wood of the same type of tree. In my mind it's a sort of vague materials and craftsmanship pun.

The first one I made was the maple one, which I designed and cut just over a year ago, just before I stopped working at the laser-cutting shop, and the oak I designed about a month after I left. Then I put the idea on hold for some time while I poured most of my energy into leather work. I told myself I would put them up for sale when I had three varieties. And last week I finally made one in walnut. So I'm declaring open season on wooden leaves! They're available on my Etsy shop.

I still have a couple other types of wood I'd like to do at some point. I think the next ones I design will probably be ash and cherry, as I have some of those woods on hand. Then there are a couple familiar trees that I'd like to do but their woods aren't commonly available, like elm and gingko. So maybe there will be more coming eventually.

These leather fortune cookies are unreasonably entertaining to me. The natural color of the leather, especially, is almost exactly the right tone to match actual fortune cookies.

In the future I will probably work out a template and actually print the fortunes, but for now they're just carefully hand-lettered. Also, I want to come up with different "flavors" of fortune, ranging from sincere to surreal.

As it turns out, leather was not quite my first idea for this. I initially thought of making them out of acrylic plastic. If you heat up acrylic to about 300°F, it softens, and you can shape it. It would end up with a clear (or colored) cookie shape, and you'd just have to be very firm in your conviction to break it open and get the fortune out. I may still do that, but in general I think leather is a more friendly material for this.

Oh, and by the way, this can serve as a menu for all the standard leather stain colors I have. (Though the gold was acrylic paint.)

These are the chainmail juggling balls (cubes?) I made for myself a few years ago. They're made of a three-dimensional Japanese type of weave. Basically, it's a weave based on a square grid, that can be extended into a cubical solid weave. So these are chainmail all the way through. They take 504 rings I believe. (I did the math for it once.)

As juggling balls, I've been super happy with them. They're about half a pound each (240 grams to be precise), which is a lot heavier than most standard balls that other people use. I've found that since they take more force to move, a variation in the throw produces less of a difference in the path of the ball than it would with lighter balls.

Another thing I like about them is that they have no rebound; when you drop them, the links collapse into each other without resistance, so they land dead, with no bounce. This means you never have problems with them bouncing out of your hands.

Also, they jingle delightfully when you throw them.

The ones shown are stainless steel. I've been juggling them consistently since 2009. They're basically indestructible. I think I would have gone through 2 or 3 sets of normal juggling balls in that period of time. I have 4 stainless ones and 2 more in galvanized steel, which tarnished to a matte gray years ago. I'm slowly getting more consistent at juggling 5. 6 is still beyond me, but I keep trying. (Shown are my friends, who are only juggling 3, but didn't want to deal with the camera.)

Anyway, I finally decided to photograph these things and put them up for order on my Etsy shop. Take a gander.

A scale hat-band I delivered today. Due to it needing to be rather precisely sized, I ended up meeting with the client and adjusting it to fit his hat with him there. I was a bit annoyed at how yellow the lighting in the coffee shop was, though.