Making bags.

Just a quick shot here of the work area I clear off my trashed computer desk when I’d rather not be down in the workshop away from the television. Ya know, when History or something has a programme about the P-51 Mustang or something equally awesome.

I’m working on a batch of bags for a customer, and here you can kind of see them in various stages of completion.

I guess I do my bags a bit differently than most. I like them a little more flat on the bottoms when they’re fully stuffed with dice or whatever. So I used a ton of expansions in the first few rows, Here it’s 16 on the queen ring, then 24, then 36 and a few rows of 36 before I contract back down to 30 ring sides. This has the effect of keeping the bottoms more or less squared off rather than hanging in an arch.

These in particular are 1.6mm stainless steel with about a 6.4mm ID

While I have a confessed hatred of expanding circles, bags like these are a very simple project for beginners. Especially fellow gamer geeks. If your dice start to outgrow your bag, you can always add more rows at the mouth, or get ambitious and scale the entire thing up by adding more expansion rows for the bottom. With a nice tight weave they’ll hold coins just as easily. I even made a large one to carry my pliers and a couple of pill bottles for rings for travel projects.

Have fun
--Charon

Technorati Tags: Stygian Chains,bags,gamer,dice,maille,chainmaille,work in progress,crafting,stainless steel,weaving,beginner tips,projects

The best news yet.

I’ve been holding back on this post because the holiday weekend, and this week just generally being pretty crazy.

I did some shopping and looking around up in Bloomington a week or so back. It’s a college town, for whatever that says. I won’t go off on an opinionated rant right now, but let’s just say it’s more than a little artsy. That’s good news for me, it turns out.

In looking around for beads and findings and stuff in the local jewellery shops. I ran across The Venue. A privately owned art gallery near the University. So I looked about, talked to the owners, mentioned what I did, and they asked to see it. So I pointed them at Etsy and gave a bit of a tour of my shop. Pretty much instantly I was invited to bring some of my jewellery to show and sell in their gallery.

A freeking art gallery, can you believe it? They host classes on occasion, and shows and a few other things. “Other things” pretty much mean “more exposure” and I’m good with that. They sell what’s on display there, as a consignment kind of deal. While they take a percentage of the sale, it’s a fair percentage. This does mean I’ll likely be raising prices online somewhat. Primarly because I have to match prices between the gallery and anywhere else I sell stuff, contractually. Coupled with the markup I have to make to actually profit after paying The Venue their portion of the sale, it becomes a little problem. I’ve done my best so far to keep my Etsy prices more than reasonable, hell, if I factor the time involved in making maille, I’ve been undercharging since the beginning anyway. Selling through Etsy however, means I only really pay a few cents in commission, and shipping. Which are more than made up for in the necessary adjustments.

What I’m getting at, is, major, major cuts in shipping charges. Probably free on lightweight items. So good news for you too!

 

Have fun,
--Charon

Technorati Tags: chainmaille,maille,chainmail,crafting,etsy,jewellery,making chainmail,marketing,promotion,packaging,shipping,The Venue,Art Gallery

Jackassery, loopholes, copyright infringement, and 35 year old children.

Yep, that’s right. Some pathetic waste of bandwidth and skin set up a crawler to Chainmaille related images over to his own photobucket account, and post them to his site. Around a week ago, Peter Croteau of Virginia made the mistake of stealing images and articles submitted and owned by the members of M.A.I.L. Following him failing to understand the burden of proof, intellectual property laws, or how to conduct himself as a member of a civilized society. His website was shut down.

  That lasted about a week.

  Now Chainmaille.org is back up online, and using a loophole in the EULA with photobucket and several other free image hosting services. Packed with images owned by myself, and many other maille crafters. The solution, aside from pulling all my images from photobucket, is a bit elusive. I’d move everything from photobucket right away if I could find anything on flickr that allows me to link to my images directly, so they could be used in forum posts and such. Since I haven’t found that yet. I’m left with keeping my hosting private, which revokes the license loophole, but it may for the time being mean until I can obtain another hosting option I’m limited in where I can post my images. Unless I begin leaving them here as blog posts and linking to them.

  The rest of the solution, is more important. Association with little Petey and Chainmaille.org should be cut off by anyone with any respect for intellectual property. There’s a reason I’m not linking to him like I try to remember to do with everyone else. His site is an attempt at Search Engine Optimization, without putting any real effort into creating his own content. Search engines require links from outside sources, such as bloggers, community sites, or anywhere else, to partially determine how useful users are likely to find the site in question, and thus the order in which a site appears on a search return.

What Peter wants is to steal traffic from artisans and crafters by appearing in the top slots of search engine results, without actually being a crafter himself. Worse, he wants to steal traffic from you by using your work. Taken without permission through a segment of the EULA that states basically, that while you still own your work on Photobucket, you automatically grant every other Photobucket user the right to publicly display, alter, edit, add to, remove from, etc. He wants your traffic, maillers, for one reason, to generate revenue from advertisement links. Yes, like some of the ads I have here. The difference however is a vast chasm: I’ve made maille, I’ve taken photos, I’ve written articles and the occasional bit of funny; Little Petey there, hasn’t yet shown any ability to make maille, snap photos, or write anything but whiney confrontational blather directed at people who own the things he’s stolen in the past.

What have we learned from this? Peter Croteau is one of the lowest kind of parasites. Photobucket isn’t as cool as it seems. In the end, there’s still assholes on the ‘net. I wonder what Google will think about using the edge of the law to coerce adsense clicks?

Have fun, Unless you’re Peter Corteau of Virginia Beach, VA. If that’s the case, have a stroke, or a cardiac arrest.

--Charon

Technorati Tags: maille,chainmaille,copyright,loopholes,promotion,marketing,intellectual property,children,crafting,making chainmail,tools,beginner tips,chainmail

Things have arrived.

Well, just one thing, or two. Exactly two photos of the Dark Aura necklace I posted yesterday.

I guess I could say this represents a more evolved line of my work. Finally branching out from copper now that I'm slightly better supplied. I don't really consider copper a primative or less formal material, but it's nice to use something else and have some variety available.

The necklace itself is composed of two real weaves, along with some simple chain. The first to mention is the centerpiece, composed of three units of Aura, a weave created by Legba of Corvus Chainmaille. A very kind and generous person who's taught me alot. The second weave involved is a good classic Half Persian 3-1. I chose this because it lies relatively flat. I didn't want a round chain for a broad piece like this.

I've always wanted to make something like this, so it's been a mini dream come true and I couldn't be more pleased with the result.

How about another tutorial for the next post? I've talked more than enough about my own projects and little annoyances getting in my way. Anyone want to see how HP3-1 is made?

Have fun,
--Charon