I Have A Quick Question, Since I Can't Seem To Find It Anywhere On Your Blog, How Much Would A Tail Be?

I have a quick question, since I can't seem to find it anywhere on your blog, how much would a tail be? Yours are absolutely beautiful and if I can save up enough in a few months I may commission one! :D

The base price for my dragon tails is $250. Certain materials and add-on options can increase the price, or getting a shorter one can reduce the price. 

I have a page with lots of info on commissioning a tail over here. There’s a link at the top of the page, and I try to link to it when I post photos of tails.

At the moment, I’ve had to close my commission queue while I clear through a lot of outstanding orders and a bunch of other life things. I expect to be able to open up for commissions again before the end of the year.

Also, just a general note, it’s really hard to reply personally when people send messages anonymously.

A hat band I made for a friend, which will be a gift to his father. Made of stainless steel rings in a European 4-in-1 pattern.

Suggest some mask ideas!

Some context: The place I go to rent time on the laser cutter recently switched how they charge. They used to charge per minute of cutting time, which was convenient because I could pop over when someone bought something off Etsy, cut it out quickly, pay for the 3 minutes of cutting time, and be out the door within 10 minutes.

But they switched to charging according to time that you’re on the machine. Which would be fine, since I’m pretty practiced and efficient, except that the minimum time they’re charging for is $50 per half hour on the cutter.

So in order to not bleed money, any time I’m there cutting something for an order I need to pad out the half hour with cutting extra copies of something else. So far I’ve been cutting blanks of the small mask designs I’ve had for a while.

But this is also a fine opportunity to make some new more small- to medium-sized designs! Recently my most popular design has been this jackal mask. I should make some more designs like that.

So what sorts of animals would people be excited to see in fancy leather mask form? Let me know!!!!?

I assembled that shark head mask design last night! Here, have a whole bunch of progress shots of me making it! Putting it behind a break so it doesn’t take up 5 pages of your dashboard:

Got no shots of it being cut, oh well. Here are all the pieces stained and laid out. I used blue and turquoise stains, with sparkly stuff mixed in. The manufacturer calls the color/additive “pearl.” I haven’t had much chance to use it yet.

That really long Y-shaped piece at top is the part that goes all the way from the nose to the back of the neck, and it’s where your head goes through. I put in a bunch of grommets into it to make the lace-up closure work nicely.

The first big thing is to test-assemble the whole thing, in case I messed something up with the design. I don’t want to start riveting it all together only to find halfway through that I messed something up.

So! Time to soak all the pieces in water to soften them up, and get going!

Starting at the center in the back.

Adding the next piece on the side, with the gills over where your ears go.

The next piece, with the side of the mouth. The eye is starting to make sense. Next comes the detail I was most worried about: the turning point at the nose.

And it worked! The leather flexed and curved just right. I had not expected it to work out this well.

Here’s what the interior looks like at this point.

Starting up the next side, in the same order. Here we see the closure, now starting to hold itself in place. 

The second side. It’s really starting to hold its shape well now.

About to deal with the second side of the tricky nose joint.

Looks great! Now just need to do the front of the neck.

Yay! Time to try it on, because I couldn’t resist.

OK, so all the parts fit together, it looks good. Now I have to do the harder part of actually hammering all those rivets closed so they’re permanent. The tricky thing about this, is you can only hammer something down from above onto a flat surface. Basically, if you’re trying to assemble a sphere out of small pieces, you can easily re-position the pieces to do the riveting while the assembly is pretty small. But you run into problems as you get close to closing it up.

What that boils down to is, I need to re-evaluate the design and figure out an order that I’ll be able to assemble it in. To get it done, I’ll basically need to disassemble the whole thing and re-assemble it.

I start with the nose...

And everything’s messy and floppy. The rivets right up in the nose area have been pounded flat. The ones down by the neck I just left in place from the test assembly to try to keep things a bit tidier while I work.

Pound it in, hammer it out. Gonna speed up the telling a bit, because it’s basically just “once more with feeling.”

Here I’ve got both sides done, and am starting up the center.

And it’s assembled! Now it just needs to dry. How do you hold something like this in place so it doesn’t flop or squish while drying?

Carefully. It’s sitting on a roll of tape wrapped in a towel perched on the tip of a strip of wood cantilevered out from my shelves. It’s actually stable. Kinda jank, though.

Thanks for reading! Sorry for the somewhat non-professional workshop environment (being, my basement bedroom). But I figure it’s more important to make cool things at a high level of quality. I often try to maintain a professional image when presenting my stuff, but sometimes it’s good to see how the sausage gets made.

I haven’t gotten nice photos of it yet, I’ll try to do that tomorrow.

Here’s an outfit with a bunch of my personal pieces. Most of these things I haven’t posted online before. The occasion for me wearing these was the anniversary party at the Wildfire Retreat this last weekend. (Wildfire is a spinning arts event that happens a couple times a year in New England. It has lots of juggling workshops and fire spinning.)

The shirt is made primarily of black anodized aluminum and black neoprene rubber, with an insignia inlaid into it made of blackened stainless steel. The pattern is a European 4-in-1 weave. When I made it originally I ran out of rings before being able to fill in the back completely, but I kind of liked it like that. So I have a pile of more rings sitting in my basement in case I decide to do that.

The horned headband is similar to this one, but with more horns.

The leather thing on my left arm was something I made the day I got a strap cutter. It links together with snaps, and was a lot of fun, but the sizing was super specific so I haven’t bothered offering it to the general public.

The arm bands and collar are your typical goth spike type of item. I thought I’d put them up on my Etsy, but it looks like I hadn’t. I don’t usually make much of a point of keeping those spikes in stock, though, so that’s probably fine.

The belt is in stainless steel in a Persian 6-in-1 sheet weave. It’s a very thick weave with a really nice texture and some interesting bending physics. It’s also the most time consuming weave I’ve ever made anything substantial out of. It took about an hour for every couple inches.

The rainbow tail is maybe the only of these things I’ve posted before. Here it is in another post. The diamond-shaped spade tip is made of birch plywood.

This costume dragon tail is in green with an asymmetrical pattern of scattered brown flecks. Also it has a heart-shaped leather spade tip.