Cerise Magazine

The inspiration for this month’s Craft Check came from my current tabletop game, where the players and I are using some of the polymer clay tokens that I taught you how to make in “Make Your Own (Easier) Miniatures.” One of the women in my game is playing a character who just obtained a mount, and we’ve spent several sessions representing the horse on our battle grid with scraps of cardboard, large dice, and anything else roughly the right size that comes easily to hand. It works well enough, but the random object solution to the mount problem is hardly elegant.

So I came up with a better answer.
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Back in our very first issue, I told you all how to make your own miniatures. Since then, I’ve had lots of people tell me that they love the idea of sculpting their own miniatures, but don’t have either the time or the sculptural creativity. I just started running a new game and I wanted to use something a little more personalized than extra dice or plastic tokens on the battle grid, but didn’t have time to create elaborate new miniatures for every character. So I came up with a method for doing very simplified “miniatures” that may appeal to those of you who find the original “Make Your Own Miniatures” tutorial too daunting.
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Because she knows I’m a dice-bag maven, [Senior Editor] Robyn’s been asking me to do a Craft Check since Cerise was just an idea, and now, months later, I’m finally getting around to it. Mea culpa – I hope this one’s enough fun to make up for the wait!

When I was sewing dice bags for my local gaming/comic-book shop, this was one of my favorite designs. It’s distinctive-looking but simple and quick to sew. It’s also tremendously easy to customize to any taste and skill-level: you can make the simple version you see here, or add any amount of embellishment, from lining, to beading, to embroidery. It’s also deceptively capacious: a fairly compact petal-point bag will hold an awful lot of dice, as you’ll see below.
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With a wide variety of back-to-school supplies currently in stock in office supply stores, now is the perfect time to construct your own custom game master’s screen. These screens are very adaptable, and can be made suitable for any tabletop game where one or more players benefit from a space to organize papers and equipment out of the view of others (note: these screens make for a nice homemade gift, if you yourself cannot use one but play in game where another can. And everyone can use the goodwill of the person behind the screen, right?). And because this particular Craft Check project can be so easily customized, the skill of the crafter can dictate the demands of the craft – anyone can have fun with it, from those who have no artistic talents whatsoever on up. Read the rest of this entry »