Something a Bit Different

I was recently asked if I could make a small dice tray to roll dungeon and dragons dice. I guess that is a thing! So, a picture was sent to explain what they wanted and it looked so very doable. I was in! I even had all materials needed on hand.

It is so great to be able to use my materials and equipment I have on hand to make something just a little different.

All pictures are of my finished tray.

The Mock Up Process and Cricut Design Space

See this is where I really appreciate Cricut Design Space (DS). In my opinion, Design Space is a really great little program for what it is for. Nice and clean interface for designing and testing or visualizing mock ups. I love it personally.

So easy to pull out a hexagonal shape and set the actual size by typing in the dimensions to get the perfect size. Simple. The only limitation here is that designs cannot be wider than 12 inches (well, 11.5″ in reality). It can be longer by using the longer 24″ mat. Of course, you can cut designs into pieces and then reassemble but that was not a good option in all cases.

Anyway, I cut the pattern shape on cardboard in my cricut maker. I then used it as a pattern to cut a light maroon vinyl and a thick felt-like fabric I had in my stash. After sewing right sides together and turning out, I simply top stitched the edge. The dice mat was mostly done at this point. It was okay, but the bottom fabric wasn’t very tight on the bottom when I folded up the sides. There was a slight bubble that interfered with the rolling the dice.

Finishing the Dice Mat

So, I cut a smaller size of fusible Peltex – heavy weight interfacing – for the bottom. I un-stitched one side and slipped in the Peltex, heat fused and resewed. Much much better! So as you can see from the images, I finished off the corners with the metal snaps using my table press and “metal fashion snaps” from Kamsnaps. The finished dice tray is about 8.5 inches across with the sides rising just over an inch all around.

Even better, the recipient really appreciated it! He sent me the picture (below) of it in use. What do you think?