About Long Dog Dice

Who I Am

My name is Jenn, and I am the resin artist behind Long Dog Dice! I am currently based in Austin, TX but spent the majority of my earlier years in the midwest. I am a dog-mom to two dachshunds, Grif and Tucker, who are the guardians of my workshop and the inspiration for my brand name.

I've always been a bit of a crafter, usually finding ways to make something myself rather than buying it. I've dabbled in painting, sewing, embroidery, wig-making, foam armor, you name it. When I'm not working or crafting, you can usually find me either playing some kind of boardgame/ttrpg or an indie PC title. If you're into the latter, I stream it over on Twitch (with the occasional dice-making stream as well).

My background is in science, and I have degrees in both chemistry and physics. I worked for a number of years on neutrino and dark matter detectors before moving into pharmaceuticals. Ultimately I decided that while I was good at science I didn't necessarily enjoy what I was doing. By that point I had become friends with some people working in the film industry who convinced me that the skills I had from the science world would translate well to that career change, so I gave it a shot. Since then I've been working in coordinator positions on different teams across live action, live broadcast, and animated productions.

Long Dog Dice Origins

Long Dog Dice started the way most of the major parts of my life have developed: out of spite.

At the beginning of my dice goblin days, I backed a Kickstarter for some dice. When they eventually showed up they were...disappointing to say the least. The quality of the finish was questionable at best, the colors were nowhere near as vibrant as expected, and the clear parts already showed yellowing. My initial reaction was an incredulous "pffft, I could make dice better than this!"

*15 minutes later*

"Could...could I make dice better than this? That has to be a thing you can do. It's just plastic, you could definitely cast dice out of resin."

This began my exposure to the world of handmade dice, a world I did not know was a thing until that moment. I spent the next few weeks going down a rabbit hole of exploring what already established makers had created and YouTube tutorials on how to create molds and cast resin. None of these were art forms I had ever tried before despite all of the other types of crafting I had cycled through over the years.

My first cast was terrible. This isn't shocking in and of itself, but what you have to understand is I'm one of those "if I'm not good at something immediately I will never be good at it and therefore must quit" people. What is shocking is that this bubbly and void-riddled sorry excuse for a d6 popped out of the mold and I went "okay, this sucks, but I know why it sucks so let's try again." For the first time in a long time, I allowed failure to be an acceptable part of the process.

Some tweaks to my procedure (and caving to the idea that I really did need a pressure pot) and a few days later I had something that I daresay resembled a usable d6. The weeks that followed were experiments in different ways to make molds, testing resin pigments (did you know purple inks have a surprisingly large tendency to become anything other than purple when put in resin?), and practicing how to sand and polish casts until I finally had it - a full set of functional dice.

Of course by then I had spent all this time learning how to make dice, so I needed to make more, right? The next obvious choice was to make sets for the rest of my D&D group. By the time I had finished those, some friends had asked for sets. And then their friends wanted some. And then people I didn't even know were sliding into my Twitter DMs. Who would I be to deny dice goblins their hoard?

And so Long Dog Dice was born.