First up, I needed to make another copy of all of the many things decks (see the bookbinding page for that book), which in itself took an unexpectedly long time, since ther eis an unexpectedly large number of them lol. I also decided to make a separate deck for the 13 card and 22 card versions that have those options, to make it easier to draw from the respective decks without needing to sort through individual cards. On a related note, the wonderful people at Wizards of the Coast created a magic item that uses the remainder of a deck of playing cards, the Deck of Miscellany, which conveniently gave me a whole pile of those to be able to sell as well!
Now on to the sleeve. Sleeves? Pocketsheet. This thing! We had spare purple fabric from the merchant bag, and black fabric from some scrap cloth laying around. I began by making long strips of the purple fabric, wrapping around the edges to prevent fraying, with a triple-layer of itself in a strip near the center for a buttonhole to add a pull ribbon to be able to pop each deck up by tugging on the ribbon, for easy selection and added bling (see later). It seems that there are two "standard" card sizes, one about 3mm wider than the other, so for each we made the pocket able to fit the widest standard size, as each of these will be for sale, and be replaced after each sale. Also taking into account, I needed to sew each pocket size to account for the different thicknesses of decks, since there are vastly different sizes ranging from the 11 card Deck of Chance to the 78 card Tarot of Many Things. We also added some added slack to each with a stack of about 10 cards to avoid the pockets being sewn too tight to slide easily.
Once I had all of these horozontal purple strips added, after much, much measuring and chalk lines, I created a bottom to each of the pockets with with a wide black ribbon, since the sides of these were all already folded over to not fray, and were of course sized to each deck as needed. Since all of this made for 17 needed pockets, I did three rows of six to give me 18 pockets, the last of which can hold dice or be used for expansion should another deck show up in the future. On that note, I can always combine the 13 and 22 card decks for those respective items into the same pocket should I need further expansion on top of that. Or I suppose add a column of three to the side, or another row underneath, y'know there's plenty of options. In either case, this will do me for a while.
With the pockets now all created, I needed to add the pull ribbons to each pocket. Now, for this I pondered for a while, what kind of decoration could I add to each ribbon to pull on, to add the aformentioned bling. I optioned to myself buttons (meh), kinda little woven loops of woody vine (cool, but potentially breakable once they dry out), and then I thought... coins! Like the obligatory copper, silver, and gold coins! Now, I'd first pondered just getting cheap fake-treasure plastic coins that look like treasure coins, and painting each in the respective colours, but couldn't find any in person in-store. So I thought, since I need to order online for this anyway, I may as well get 3d prints for the canon shapes for the D&D coins! Then I can have alternating copper, silver, and gold coins, with one platinum at the very end!
AND! AND, I could still take one of those plastic treasure coins (I ordered some of those too for this specifically), and make a Thonian gold coin!!! This calls back to Raven's epic quest (YouTube playlist), specifically Temple of the Frog (YouTube video), so we took one of those plastic coins, added a bit of JB Weld around the rim both for strength, and as well to be able to write into the wet epoxy the needed text, Uther Once And Always, and just the empire name Thonia on the back, since that side isn't described. By chance the plastic treasure coins that we found did have the profile of a bearded man, as described of the coin, and so after the JB Weld modification, we painted it gold, and while the text isn't as clean as an actual stamped coin, I'm going to canonically chalk it up to the technology to make them 4000 years ago wasn't as tight as it is today, let's go with that. Not that anyone will really see it, since it'll be behind the shop table, and will only really be seen glanced at a sharp angle as people walk past my booth, so it's just flavour for flavour's sake really. But, a Thonian gold coin!
And then, the 3d printed coins arrived! And there was a... minor problem, comparing it to the D&D coins (ForgottenRealms Fandom). Now, they were advertised as this colour (which I initially didn't even notice), but maybe they did that to avoid issues? I dunno, but I was painting them anyway. So we turned the silver squares bronze, the copper triangles silver (and put a hole in them), the platinum hourglasses gold (with that added circular feature trimmed off), and... well, I don't want to just paint a copper piece platinum. So, we decided to go with the Waterdeep Harbor Moon (ForgottenRealms Fandom), since Raven resides in Waterdeep. Though, smaller, to fit on the cardsleeve. Also, I initially made it... not crescenty enough, so we took some of the initial trimmings (it's made out of like... 6 layers of wooden veneer left over from the Box of Many Things), added a few metal pegs from a safety pin to firmly connect these added... crescent corners we'll call them, and readjusted the shape that way.
I carved the faces of the harbor moon as best I could to the official art, though quite scraggly given I have more larger size carving tools, and the softwood veneer wanting to splinter off if I tried anything smaller, but we managed. One face has a castle in the middle, with winged griffon in a very basic sense, and the other side with two ships, one being pulled under by giant tentacles, and that's mostly recognizable. Given where it will be attached, this will do me quite well. Also it felt quite sturdy thanks to the plywood with high quality wood glue style construction. I added a bit of white to the gold and silver to make it platinum with an electrum inlay (any whiter and it just didn't look metallic any more, but it is noticeably lighter, and matches the official art well), and we gave the entirety of the coins three layers of topcoat, and gave it a solid week to fully dry before attaching them to the decksheet/cardslot/sheetsleeve/slotsheet/decksleeve/cardpocket..., and then considered how to label the pockets.
<More to come>
Finished Month x, 2025
