D20 Chonks from Scratch

42mm Jesmonite chonk in two shades of blue swirled together, the numbers painted in with metallic copper, sitting on an oak stand.

I kept thinking I wanted to get a little more experience with mold making and casting. I have nieces, nephews, and friends who are all playing various tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons regularly. Dice would make great gifts for all of those people. I have also been enjoying the work of some of the resin artists I have found making dice. I didn’t really want to do a bunch of resin casting in my home studio, but had become aware of some less-toxic stone-based “eco resin” casting materials like Jesmonite.

Back in March, I started working on making a big 42mm 20-sided die (a D20, in TTRPG parlance). I modeled it in Blender with a font I like (and have properly licensed), and set about 3D printing one from which to make molds. Although I have been knocking out all sorts of perfect models on my resin printer, there were some issues with getting my Anycubic machine to produce a flawless D20. At first, it was mechanical. It took me a bit to realize the plate had worked itself loose in a way apparently isn’t expected, then a bit to get it fixed correctly. Minor issues after that were eventually resolved by choosing the right resin.

From that print and a printed mold form, I made silicone molds, eventually coming up with a slightly-modified cap mold style that seems to work pretty well.

I cast a bunch of dice in Jesmonite, playing with various mixing and pouring techniques, different pigments, and various approaches to keeping bubbles and voids from ruining the casts. I mostly settled on using an old dental vibration table, some tapping and stretching of the filled molds, and a pressure pot for the later.

I have been painting in the numbers with acrylic paint, and finishing by polishing with bees’ wax.

There are a lot more finished dice than I am showing in this post.  I haven’t managed to photograph all of them yet.  I may add more in the future.

Once I had some big dice, I decided I needed to make some cool gift boxes for them. That’s for another post, though.

I made a video walking through the journey of getting some finished Jemonite chonks:

You can also watch some of them spin in the demo short:

Reputation Tracker

Reputation tracker - a wooden box with a list of names on the face, each with a row of holes that accept cribbage pegs.

Kira of Cryptid Dicecraft asked me to make a “reputation tracker” for their Victorian era fae-themed table top role playing game (TTRPG). I made a few changes and expanded on their rough design to make this.

Overall, it is 10cm square and about 3.2cm tall and, made of walnut hardwood. After a fair amount of sanding, I finished it with a few layers of wipe-on polyurethane, lightly sanded between layers.

The bottom is a box to contain the cribbage pegs used for tracking and, connects to the top with magnets.

The engrave on the face is filled using silver acrylic paint. I glued a piece of nice black card stock to the back of the top piece. I lined the lower box and put a gasket between the parts with cork.

I took some photos on my tarnished silver tea service and, made a short making-of video.

Azuma Bukuro Dice Bag

Azuma Bukuro Dice Bag (open)

I thought a simple dice bag styled after a Japanese azuma bukuro bento/market bag would be fun.  The fabric is 100% cotton sateen, custom-printed with one of my Celtic key pattern designs.  I cut the fabric on the laser using the new vacuum tray, which was great for the precision.

Green Pouch

A small fantasy/Medieval belt pouch. The main body is cotton fabric printed with interlocking Celtic spirals in various shades of green. The front, bottom, back and flap are medium brown faux/vegan leather. The flap is decorated with black spirals and, there is a black spiral triskelion on the front below the flap.

I printed some of the Celtic spirals fabric in green and, used it with the brown faux/vegan leather to make another pouch.