Get Your Strap On

      I just wrapped up construction of a project that has been on my to-do list for several years: guitar straps. You see, about fifteen years ago, I did a re-build of the old lighting rig for Rogue Cthulhu. I build log of that re-build to post here has also been on my to-do list for several years. Anyway, part of that re-build included using a winch to raise the new light rig. That winch used nylon webbing (seat belt material) instead of the usual rope on the winch. I sourced a fair bit of grey and also black 2" webbing for that project and had quite a bit left over. My immediate thought was, "let's use it to make guitar straps." That thought ruminated in my mind for the next fifteen years, until last night.

 

     Over the past two or so years, I've been piecing together the other parts I'd need to make the guitar strap project; buckles, leather...  Well, that's pretty much it, buckles and leather, and I already had the leather. But in my defense, I did have a difficult time finding buckles that I thought were perfect for the job, and also, I didn't look very hard. 

     The leather I used is a thin soft calf skin like black leather (not sure of its origin) with a textured pattern on one side. I found this leather at a discount store many many years ago. It is far too thin and weak to be used for the strap ends, so of course, that's what I used it for. To make it work, I doubled up the leather, giving me the textured pattern surface on both sides, and also sandwiched 10 oz. black cotton canvas between the layers. These I married with spray adhesive, and would later stitch the edges for reinforcement. I cut out the strap ends with the help of a template I made in Inkscape, using an existing guitar strap from my collection as a guide.

     Once all the pieces and the stars aligned, All that was left was to dig out the sewing machine and assemble the straps. It was pretty evident that I hadn't used my sewing machine in quite a while. My first attempt yielded pretty horrible results. After switching to grey thread, like a normal person would, I ripped out and re-sewed that zig-zag stitch about a dozen times before I was satisfied with the results (read as: too frustrated to continue).

     After adding the buckles and stitching the ends, I cut the strap button holes with a hole punch and a craft knife. That's it. It took about an afternoon to make three of them. Probably would have gone a lot faster if my sewing wasn't so bad.

Rogue Cthulhu Dice Box

 Just a few months before COVID shut down all gaming conventions all over the world, I regained control of Rogue Cthulhu, the gaming club I co-founded over 20 years ago. In those few months between Thanksgiving 2019 and when the world shut down in March 2020, I was hard at work trying to prepare for the next Rogue Cthulhu show at the Origins Gaming Convention. One of my areas of focus was to re-establish the prize table and point system that had been dismantled while I was away from the helm. 

This is one of the prizes that I was working on at that time. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of its construction. It's a portable dice rolling box, with a side area for storing and transporting your gaming dice. The lid slides open like a pencil box top. The sides of the box are oak. The top and divider are sapele. The bottom is lined with bonded leather. The sides and top are all laser etched. 

I'm not sure if or when Rogue Cthulhu might return to the gaming convention scene, but if it does, I will probably make more of these. I initially only made two, and since the future of the club is currently uncertain, I think I'm going to give these two away to some friends.

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.

Smudge Fan v3.0

To date, one of the most popular posts on this blog (and certainly on Pinterest) is my first attempt at making a smudging fan. And as I have previously stated, I hated that project. I only made that version of fan one time, and only made four of those fans total. Then I tried a new design, which was much simpler and I liked the finished product much better. I have made several dozen of the second iteration of smudging fan, and still use that design when making new fans. However, today I worked on a new design, or rather a variation of the second design, and it turned out fairly well.

This fan came about as a way to salvage a damaged feather, because I was too cheap to just throw it away. I prepared a batch of wild turkey feathers to be made into v2.0 fans, by trimming the tips and inserting a bamboo skewer into the quill to give it strength. I then cut the skewer to the desired length of my handle. This makes it possible to get a decent handle of a consistent length, even if the quill is damaged, weak or short.

Normally, I would then just wrap the handle with suede leather lace, and add a few beads to the ends of the lace and call it done, but this time I decided to apply a new technique I had read about, wherein one uses a hot iron to flatten and straighten the feather. Here is where things went wrong. I set my iron too hot and it melted the vane on one side. It only melted part of it, and only about half-way up, but it made the feather pretty ugly and unusable. I was just about to throw it away when I got the idea to see if I could convincingly cover up the damaged part with another smaller feather.

I selected a couple of smaller wild turkey feathers to overlap the main feather on either side (thus covering up the damaged part of the vane). I held the shafts of the smaller feathers in place with a wooden clothes pin and used thick CA glue and spray activator to glue the shafts together. I didn't like the way the junction where the three feathers came together looked, so I covered it up with a small black marabou feather, also attached with CA glue.

I then began wrapping the handle with suede leather lace, making sure to cover over the joint where the shafts came together. I put a few dabs of CA glue under the leather in a few spots to make sure the wrapping didn't shift or come loose.

 In the picture just above, you can see the damaged part of the main feather along the right side.

As I did with v2.0, I added some accent beads to the ends of the leather wrapping, and that was it. Not terribly complicated, or significantly more difficult to make, but a little fancier than v2.0. I might make a couple more of these and sell them at a premium (compared to the simpler v2.0), but it is unlikely they will replace v2.0 completely.

Tarot Bag

A couple of years ago, I was shopping at my favorite discount store, which gets one-off random stuff in all the time that it sells for dirt cheap, and I found a big bin full of these leather scraps. It is super soft calf-skin like leather with a cool pattern on it.

Each scrap was about 2-3 square feet in area, and I think they cost me about $2 each, so I bought a LOT of them. Other than one small modification project that I won't describe, this is the first project that I have used this leather for.

I'm always finding that the stock sizes for velveteen bags that I can get for the store are ill suited for holding tarot cards. If they are tall enough, they are too wide. So I decided to make a few tarot bags from these leather scraps.

I don't do a lot of sewing. I'm not particularly good at it, and just about every time I touch a sewing machine, it jams up on me. But I do have a sewing machine (the second cheapest one I could get from walmart), and I did take Home Ec. in Jr. high, so I know the basics of how to sew.

I made a chipboard template (5"x9") to help with cutting out all the pieces of leather. Each piece of leather was then spray glued to a piece of green lightweight cotton fabric, which will become the bag's liner.

The top edge was folded over on each piece and sewn down. This will be the top edge of the bag, and this is where the drawstring will go.

The two sides of the bag were sewn together with a zigzag stitch that wraps around the edge of the fabric to prevent fraying. The bag is sewn together inside out.

Once the drawstring is threaded through the hem at the top edge, the bag can be turned right side out.

This was a fairly simple project, but one that I think will sell well in my shop.

DMG repair and recover

It seems like the only time I get to post anything is when I am off of work for some reason, which isn't often. This time I am home sick with bronchitis. So that makes it a wonderful opportunity to post about one of my projects I recently finished.

This project took a LONG time to complete. Way longer than it should have. I experimented with a few new techniques, a few new materials, and I was never really sure where the design was going. All in all I'd say I have mixed feelings about the outcome. It started when a friend of mine, we'll call him "Eric" (because that's his name, -duh), left his Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition Dungeon Master's Guide at my house after a game session. Before I could return it to him, the book got dropped and the spine cracked. I promised to fix it for him, though he didn't really care. He would have just replaced it. That's the kind of guy he is. It took me almost a year to make good on that promise!

For those of you who are not familiar with it, here is what the D&D 3.5 DMG looks like. The cover image evokes the feeling of a 3D sculpture, and that's what I wanted to do with this re-cover. I envisioned a multi-layered design with ridges, baubles, and thin strips of riveted metal trim. That is not quite what I ended up with.

To begin, I started sketching out some designs on butcher paper at 1:1 scale. I had no idea where I was going with it. I just sketched as the spirit moved me. One thing I knew I would need for sure were titles. So I started with those, figuring I could design the rest around them.

 Then I sketched a framework around the title elements. What I ended up with was a sort of art deco style applique.

 I glued the original sketch to some chipboard and cut it out with a hobby knife.

 Then I got around to fixing the broken spine with some tyvek. As with many modern RPG books, there was no mull in this book. It relied entirely on the strength of the end paper and the varnished paper covering material to hold the boards to the spine. As pretty as varnished paper can be, I think it makes a lousy covering material, and even more lousy text block pages. It is brittle and cracks and tears easily. It was the varnished  paper covering material that cracked and split when the book was dropped.

 I used the cut out chipboard as a template to draw the same framework design for the back cover, and also to make an archive copy of the design, in case I ever want to use it again. Since the back cover didn't need the titles on it, I put cut outs in the areas where those were.

Then I cut out the back cover applique and glued both to the original cover boards, after roughing the original covers up with some sand paper. Another drawback to varnished paper covers. Glue doesn't want to stick to them.

 I wanted the titles to be 3D too, so I re-drew them on some thinner chipboard (a shirt box) and cut them out, gluing them directly over top where they were originally drawn on the cover sketch. As you can tell, I'm not really good at drawing custom fonts.

 For covering material I was trying a new product that I had purchased a few months earlier and was dying to try out, bonded leather. The look and feel of leather at a fraction of the cost. When I first got it I thought it looked great. But now that I have worked with it a little, the honeymoon is definitely over. The surface looks and feels more like vinyl than leather, and it has much different handling properties than working with leather. It doesn't absorb glue the same; it doesn't stretch the same. I don't like it. I don't like the look of it, and I don't like working with it. But I have a bunch of it, so I guess I'm stuck with it.

After gluing down the bonded leather covering material, I filled some large zip-lock bags with sand to use as weights that would conform to the intricate curves of the appliques and hopefully give me a nice contour to the leather.

 Then I added more weight to make sure I got the best possible compression. A lot more weight.

 Sadly, the results were unimpressive. I have successfully used the sand bag trick before on a smaller scale, so I had high hopes. But after the weights were removed, the leather showed poor definition around the appliques. Time for plan B.

 I went down to the local pharmacy and asked for some medium sized syringes. After explaining what I wanted them for, and convincing the pharmacist that I was not a junky, he agreed to sell me some. I needed a needle that was big enough to let watered down glue flow through it, but that was small enough not to damage the leather with a noticeable hole. I think the ones I got were 25 gauge. I injected the cover with some more glue at all the edges of the appliques, working it around by massaging the leather with my fingers. Then I took the cut out pieces from the original appliques (thank goodness I hadn't thrown them away yet) and taped them down in their respective places. Then I reapplied the weight and let it dry. I only did one half at a time, because I had no idea if this would work.

 Success! You can see in the picture below, the difference in definition that the chipboard pieces made compared to the sand bags. Not all of the areas were as crisp as I would have liked, but it was a vast improvement.

 I repeated the process to the other half of the cover and finally I got something that I thought was passable, though I wasn't thrilled with it.

The cover of this book was going to be busy and bright with lots going on (or at least that's what I wanted), so the subtle raised letters of the titles would simply not do without more embellishment. I decided to try another experimental technique, gold leafing. I had tried it once before on a small leather journal, but the results were unimpressive. I don't know why I though it would be different this time, but I was hoping for something akin to a miracle.

 I applied the sizing agent (glue) to the cover as carefully as my artistic skills would permit. Then I covered the affected area with a thin delicate sheet of fake gold foil. Then I covered that with a sheet of waxed paper and used a rolling pin on it to ensure good adhesion. Then I carefully flicked away all the unstuck foil with a paint brush.

 The results were, once again, not particularly impressive, but at least it did make the titles pop. I probably could have gotten at least as good of an effect with a gold paint marker. Maybe it's because I can't draw for crap.

Moving on, It was no use crying over amateurish gold leafing. Time to bring the rest of this design marvel to life, starting with some brass studs. These were brass upholstery tacks. The holes were all pre-drilled. A drop of super glue was applied to the shaft of the tack. The tacks were hammered through the cover. Then the protruding shafts were cut off from the underside with wire cutters and ground down flush with a Dremel tool.

My grandiose plans were being whittled down to much more simple designs. Instead of the complicated multi-layered metal trim pieces I had sort-of envisioned, I opted for some much more feasible metal appliques to fit into the recesses of the art deco framework. These were all hand cut from a sheet of thin copper sheet (I think it was something like 30 gague). They were glued on with Barge brand contact cement, the best contact cement I know of.

And then I added brass brad heads in the same fashion as the brass upholstery tacks. This was the first time I had used sheet metal in this fashion. In the future I would stay away from acute angles. They tend to get pokey, even if glued down well.

The text block was cased in with a proper mull and grey end papers. I had a little trouble with the spine as the original text block was a "perfect bound" glue binding, but I sorted it out in the end. The pva glue from my new mull didn't want to stick to the glue from the perfect binding, and ended up with the new mull pulling away from the spine, but glued to the end papers. I solved this by cutting up some tiny floral glue beads into thin slivers to fit down the gap at the spine, then applying a hot iron to melt them. This affixed the old perfect bound spine to the new mull nicely.

I don't think the book turned out terribly, but I wasn't really happy with it. And of course Eric could care less about a custom cover. He just wanted a functional book. Some of the new techniques and materials didn't turn out as well as I would have hoped.