So along the way with the playful tweets, I kept using the #TeamCRONCH hashtag. The Kickstarter had tiers of support like “High Tea” that I supported, so clearly, we gotta stick with this. Most of the tweets ended up as things like video of my cat licking wet food off a giant d20, me pouring milk over dice like its cereal. It was fun and ended up being a pretty big part of their brand identity (I will not confirm being responsible for the “I will not eat the dice” inside all their packaging. But it was fun, we got to play some D&D together, and talk about meeting at the convention. As their business grew and they wanted to expand visibility, Karen asked me about helping work at her booth at a convention because I had some experience from the fandom convention running I’ve been doing the last few decades. Part of our D&D players that were local had worked with me before on those, so we pitched the idea and got people together to help out at Gencon.
Over the years, we’ve been fortunate enough to help the Dispel team at events. The hunger for those delicious crunchy math rocks kept going. Somewhere along the way, I purchased a set from a small Etsy shop through Twitter. The communication was bad, the product took forever to ship, and there were imperfections. I was naturally exposed to more of this community and just really thought it was cool to see people making art. I always wished I could draw. I wrote when I was younger and always had that creative urge. Karen was very supportive when I said I’d love to make my own designs for dice some day. With that other convention runner gig, I had an opportunity to miss my full flight, take a 5AM trip to New York, and get $750 for offering my seat the night before. With that, I decided it was time to take the plunge.
On and off research got me partially prepped. With a few items off Amazon, a trip to Harbor Freight, and some crappy Amazon molds, I gave it a shot and — no air bubbles! Some of the first sets looked great and I was so happy with the results. Karen ended up mailing me some of her molds so I could experiment, but I was so pleased with the results. Given my proximity to someone with a lot of experience and high standards of quality, I quickly fell into this trap.
$750 doesn’t go far when you’re really going for it. I got a good air compressor, I got a good pressure pot. I got the respirator, the safety glasses, nitrile gloves. I got resin and I got silicone (gotta make my own molds, right?), I got mica powder, ink, pigment paste. I built a bench on wheels specifically for this crafting and the inevitable mess. I got dividers, mixing tools — I went all-in.
The goal was never to start my own business. I wanted to make myself some cool dice, then make my friends some. I just started this in late 2024, but its been a lot of fun and as I do stuff like making my mom a whole dominos set, making drink coasters, learning different techniques, and getting to be creative. If my story sounds like fun and you want to join me in being an amateur resin crafter, let me know and I’m happy to share some tips on what to do and not do!