Key Fobs v1.0

I recently returned to the leadership position of my old gaming club, Rogue Cthulhu and due to changes in policy during the four years I was away, our once vaunted prize table now has to be rebuilt from scratch. So, first I made a list of reasonably simple and inexpensive craft items I could make to begin rebuilding our stock of prizes. We often get gifts of larger prizes, like RPG books, as prize support from publishers connected to the games we run, so what we mostly need is smaller prizes that work with our point chip system.

The first such project that I thought of was a line of laser engraved wooden key fobs with various Cthulhu Mythos related images on one side and the Rogue Cthulhu logo on the other. I mean, after all, what good is having a laser cutter if you can't use it to make prizes!

The design for the fobs was fairly simple and laid out in Inkscape. Then they were cut and engraved, double sided, on the Glowforge laser cutter out of 3mm birch plywood. I made about 60 of these in total. About half were left their natural color, while the rest were stained with varying hues of wood stain. All were sealed with a clear gloss top coat.

The metal split rings came from Michaels. The split rings were attached to the fobs with a 15mm x 75mm strip of bonded leather. Some are black and some are brown. I got the bonded leather in large rolls off of eBay some years ago. The strips were glued into a loop connecting the fob and the ring, using Barge cement, and then a nickle finish double cap rivet was used to cinch the loop.

The engraving and cutting took about 45 minutes per side for each batch of 20. The staining and top coating probably took about an hour total. Cutting, gluing and riveting the bonded leather loops probably took about an hour and a half to do all sixty fobs.