I can’t remember the last time I played honest to goodness Dungeons and Dragons. It might well be the the launch event I put on for a friend’s podcast when 5e came out. But when your best friends in town say ‘you have to join this group’ … what’s a gamer to do?

More importantly, what’s a gamer with a Glowforge to do?

Yup. Had to. How could I not? Especially when my wife had one of those once a quarter ‘you actually have to do some work in the office in Portland’ weeks followed by a weekend spending time with friends and family in the area.

Leaving me alone on a weekend is, for a number of reasons, never a good idea. Things like this happen:

I figured, hey, they’re small, it’s just two short rows of stitching, I can knock out enough of these for a group of gamers in a weekend, no sweat. Armed with that hubris, I one upped myself: Different colors for everyone, let them pick which one they want.

Trivia: I didn’t honestly believe it was possible to tell the difference between Cordovan and Chocolate. They look strikingly similar when the dye is fresh but I figured, what the heck, and went for it anyway. In bad lighting, you can’t tell the difference. In good lighting, it’s not hard to spot which one is which (Chocolate is lighter.)

Tip (use at your own risk): I genuinely have no idea how long some of the I was using had been in storage… maybe longer than I’ve worked for Glowforge? It cut fine as long as I was just cutting with the Glowforge. When I started beveling edges though, that was a different story. Liberal amounts of Neatsfoot oil perked things up nicely. I’ve also been experimenting with oiling before dying… so far, the results have been good.

At that point, I would have called it a night, left the office and done the rest at home. But… evidently the Mariners had a game… and the game had just ended. Leaving the office wasn’t going to happen reasonably quickly until that crowd dispersed so…

There isn’t a ‘fast’ way to hand hammer 66 rivets. There just isn’t. My anvil, however, was perfect to use as a form for folding all the bits into place!

Once I got the first one done, I put it to the other important test:

Yes, it is exactly the right size for a card wallet and keys! I promptly claimed one as my own because as hip pouches go, it’s a perfect size for the essentials. Now I just need a phone sized one

I did say something about the hubris of thinking I could knock out a bunch of these relatively quickly right? So, last lesson learned: bring short needles if you’re stitching inside a small pocket. First side has been fairly easy… little fussy but not too bad. For the bottom half of the stitches on the second side though, I had a heck of a time getting my hand down in there. I’d estimated stitching at about 10 - 15 minutes to a side… closer to 20-25, with at least four times as many unprintable utterances as expected.

Still, they turned out fairly nicely, and each one is still less than 2 hours start to finish.

Happy crafting everyone!