oloriel | Ambitions of cloud...

... and fingers of clay, that's me.

Originally Andie and I had planned to go to the Medieval Christmas Market in Siegburg (= larger than the one in Cologne, and free of charge even when you show up after 2 pm), but she got ill. So I was home sooner than expected.

For some reason I don't remember I still have Drachenfest coins in my pencil case, and during the not overly exciting Gothic Shakespeare lecture I not only managed to draft most of my presentation for next week but also chanced to look at those coins, and thought that I could make a nice and easy Christmas present for my brother from one of them.

My brother is also a LARPee. His character's a baronet from a Renaissance-ish fantasy realm that features in the unfinished fantasy blockbuster he is currently writing (like half the people I know, I suppose), and this Drachenfest he also became embassador for the Grey Camp (which is what we're playing, working and fighting for - shut up, Grey's totally in style).

So I figured it'd be cool if he had a Grey Camp pendant thingy for his chain of office. You know, them heavy necklace thingies that all the important people in The Tudors are wearing. That kind of thing.
There's a coin-cutting jeweller at the big Medieval Markets in summer, whose services of course I cannot really afford, but hey. All he does is take an existing coin, drill some holes in, and then with a goldsmith's saw takes all the stuff between the rim and the image out.
I do not have a goldsmith's saw, but I have a jigsaw, which is totally the same thing ~~except perhaps more clumsy~~, right? And I don't really have experience with metalwork, but you get experience by trying, right?

So I spent the evening hours making a pendant for the brotherthing. I used a "copper" coin because I don't have many silvers and no golds and the copper's the most dispensable anyway. I should gild (or pseudo-gild, at any rate) it - the rest of the chain is gold, so copper would look kinda silly - but not today. I will also have to do some more fiddling with the wings and tail, but I was getting fed up with it, so I figured it would be better to put it aside before I ruined it completely in my impatience.

(The real coin's there so you can judge the size, because otherwise it'll look huge which it isn't.)

I did another pendant (not for the brotherthing) from a copper sheet we still have lying around from trying to make LARP coins ourselves. Wouldn't have used copper if I had a choice, really, but you try to get silver or gold sheets without being a jeweller and without paying a hand and a foot for it. (Oh, it's easy enough to get silver or gold-coloured metal sheets, which will in fact be aluminium and brass. At least the copper is real copper.) Because a coin is really just a round metal plate with an image on it, right? So you can as well use a blank metal plate and draw something on it and then cut it out, right?

Well, technically yes (though it was of course presumptuous to make a Feanorian pendant of all things with my poor skills). I tried this before once, years ago, and this one is at least slightly better (at least it is presentable from both sides: The one from 2007 only has one good side). \o/.

Obsessed? Me? Nevah. :p