So why locally handmade resin dice?

I've been a crafter for the majority of my life. I make, or I think about making, things every week. My daughter-in-law and my son are both amazingly talented crafters too, and we love each others' company.

I have played with resin in various forms for the last 10 years. When N asked about making something in resin, I was all for it, and I picked up a couple of cheap molds from Amazon. I already had epoxy resin, mica powders and alcohol ink, so we just went for it.

(A really important point here is that I already had a bunch of PPE: a couple of respirators with VOC blocking cartridges, thick nitrile gloves and two HEPA air purifiers. As I said, I craft a lot!)

I have a large studio - again, I am a crafter by nature - and many windows, so we were quickly set up safely, with open windows and fans, and the above-mentioned PPE. 30 minutes later, we left the room, closed the door tightly and took off those darned respirators!

And what a wild 30 minutes that was! We poured and mixed, and mixed and poured, and debubbled the resin in the molds. Then we waited 72 hours. That's a really long time.

When we finally demolded our first set of dice, we were so thrilled! Sure, there were bubbles (I had never heard of a pressure pot before starting this craft). Yes, some of the colours had mixed in unexpected ways. Meep! There were weird ridges on the 1 face of the D20.

But they clacked beautifully! And we were smitten!

D joined in a couple of sessions later, and, suddenly, we were all watching YouTube for techniques, advice, inspiration.

Over the last year, we have upgraded our equipment:

• 2 pressure pots
• better molds
• great resin dyes and powdered pigments
• a vibratory tumbler - oh man, that was a journey!

And we stay excited every week. We learn new things, like printing our own dice masters and making our own silicone molds. There is even a shared calendar so we know when we will be making, demolding or finishing our dice.

It also means we have a serious amount of dice; more than enough for our inner dice goblins. So we decided to have a go at selling them.

We didn't really want to go down the Etsy, etc path, so we tried a local Christmas market and sold so many sets!

And here we are. We are happily making dice together, attending local (Ottawa) events, and hoping to make this craft self-sustaining. It's really not about the money; it's about defraying some of the costs to keep doing something that brings us closer together as a family and gives us so much enjoyment.