Awalon

November news

Heyo folks!

Big workshop update to start with: pretty much done with the shuffle! Took two months of hard work, but now at least all the essentials are in place. The last bits that need fixing I'll just handle as we go along.

To sum up the prior workshop setup in a simple descriptive sentence: a cramped osha maze (see picture evidence above!). Now, on the other hand, the entire workshop is getting genuinely nice. No more stored materials/tools occupying valuable workspaces! No mor...

October oupdate

Heyo folks! 

Pictured: a small amount of the stuff I'm moving out of the workshop and into the creepy bunker storage room. Pics of 'revamped workshop' etc next update when I'm done with it all!

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It's been a wild month here. Project "catch up" continues, with a few added twists! 

[X] Black hoods
[X] Patreon drop (!!!!yes finally)
[ ] Finish workshop shuffle
[ ] Brown hoods
[ ] Light skin hoods
[ ] Resume detailed notes -> Finish suit rig<...

September speculation

'Eyo folks! All good on your ends I hope?

Pictured: elves and humans living side by side... in my oven. Also furnishing mspaints, see below for context!

[X] Black hoods
[/] Patreon drops
[ ] Skin-toned hoods
[ ] Bigrig

Getting there, one step at a time... I have to say, feels good to catch up and crunch things down one by one without the stress from the previously dysfunctional day job breathing down my neck. Getting the black hoods restocked is a major relief, and ...

August aupdate

'Allo folks!

Summer's over and I'm back from my vacation. Hope you all got some sunshine and rest too. It's been a long spring for me with some unexpected daytime job stress issues, so this summer vacation was seriously needed. The big problems have been resolved, but I do have some very real recovery to get through.

I'll have to be a bit careful with my health during the autumn, and put a bit of extra effort on getting back into gear for latex dorking. There's both the physical b...

June jinxing

'Allo folks! All good?

Last proper 'monthly' post before the usual summer vacation in July (back mid-august!). Going to cover two topics - the usual workshop news, and a retrospective of the last year.

Starting with workshop news, I could pull up the bullet points, but it's basically two... One of which is several paragraphs. No bullet points for y'all today!

First up, the quick one - 250kg of supplies (aka SUIT-126) arrived earlier this week! If you ever wondered where the ...

May hem

'Allo folks, and hooray it's almost summer! Y'all doing alright?

Many things are still going a bit slow whatwith the stressy job-switch and all that, but the main suit rig is still a nice therapeutic build. Plus, I've had a precursor to a heureka moment with the overall tech... More on that in a bit. 

First off, let's talk suit rig.

Pump:

- Finished the pump bladder (suit-127). Still needs to be tested though.

- Finished the lid (SUIT-121). Doesn't need to b...

April adventures

'Allo folks, how's life?! 

It's been a hectic month, but good progress on the big project at least. As usual a mix of the todo-map, photos and text!

Before we get into the suit rig progress, smaller summaries on workshop-relevant stuff:

- During last week I successfully "resigned" from what I affectionately called day-job-#2, aka another 10-15h/week due to small-firm-and-pandemic. Towards summer and on I'll be back to a survivable 8h/day of work at last. Obviously going...

March manufacturing

'Allo folks, welcome to another monthly update wherein I combine braindumping and planning!

First off - I'll be casting hoods now in late march/early april, so expect the patreon drops during the next month.

Beyond that, it's been a bit on the hectic side here. Hoods and fun inventions have been on the backburner, main focus has been the big suit rig and my 'drop the second job'-plan (wrote about it on FB) that'll net me more time for latex works. So far so good with both of those...

Frantic february

Whoey, this was a rough month. A mix of the day jobs eating me alive and the workshop stuff not quite going fully as planned (grounded a phase late on a saturday, 2 full workshop-days wasted on fixing it, boo).

For a bit of context on the whole 'eaten alive by the day job'-thing, my usual weeks look like...

40h job1
10-20h job2
10-20h workshop

My long term goal is to swap that to 0-0-40, i.e. sustainably work fulltime on the suit projects. Right now I'm working my ass ...

January jupdate

Heyo folks, welcome to 2022! I'm still surprised things are going more or less according to plan, no major 'goddamnit that won't work'-moments yet. I've had to adjust designs and plans aplenty, but there's a difference between adjusting and getting blocked :)

Reminder before we get into things, $50 lifetime ahead of next post (~feb 15th) if you want in on the hood-round (black, elf/newmodel). I'll start pinging people when the post drops - should hopefully have the new model mostly sort...

December deliberations

Heyo folks, old and new! 

First of all - I mentioned I'd do another hood-drop now that things are working. With some minor tweaks to the concept, we're doing it like this:
- active and >$50 lifetime...
- ...by the 13th of February, i.e. when the Feb post lands, ...
- ...and I'll drop a black hood of the latest spec as a thank you for the support! (will PM and inquire details)

Two main reasons for the advance warning/february date;
- avoiding the 'awww, I was _a...

November news

The most boring month for alliteration, but it's sneaking by surprisingly fast. Two threads of progress this month, hoods and the suits! 

Hoods:

You may have seen on the FB page that I mentioned solving the texture issue on the hoods (see SUIT-99 pic for an excaggerated explanation - my surfaces simply weren't smooth enough). Long story short, about 3h of sanding and surfacing per mold was needed. And I have a total of 6 active molds (5 sizes, 2L). Yeah. That ate like a week....

October observations

'Allo folks!

I mentioned in the sept post that I felt much better now that the headache of the rig issue was past, and that is holding up! The late september "make a bunch of skin-toned hoods"-plan went well enough, so that means we can look to the future with all this new energy. As usual, feedback's greatly appreciated! Let me know if I gloss past something that makes you go "wait what", yeah?

There's basically three main categories of todo-items as I see it right now;
1) Res...

Superb september solutions!

Greetings, fellow suit afficionados! Laaaate monthly post, but the delay was worth it. Good news and answers aplenty!

As you know, I've been fighting with the production system since the start of the year. I'll be honest, it's completely eaten my life and all of my energy. Lots of other subprojects, but I haven't had the peace of mind to work on them with the core system issues haunting me. Burning €3k+ on the full-suit casting chamber without a fully working process was qu...

August activities

'Allo folks, and welcome to season 3!

As usual, I cannot thank you all enough for the continued support. We've got interesting times ahead!

I mentioned on the public FB season plan post (https://www.facebook.com/awalonsstuff/posts/3211453862406866) that I'd deep-dive a bit more on Patreon, and here we are. As usual, let me know if I gloss over anything interesting, or if y'all hav...

June junk #2!

Technically july now, but belated june post before the summer sabbathical!

Q2 was... brutal. Urgh. I've got serious abstinence going for workshopping the interesting things again! The production system issues definitely ate my life - the original plan was to finish it in late march, and I think y'all know how that went. Sometimes I miss just crafting with existing techniques, but then I remember that there's way too many technical gaps for our purposes. Gotta' tech up for magnificent ma...

June junk

Crunch-season at the daytime job, hurgh :/

I'll drop a proper update a bit later this month. Whole slew of suit-/hood-supplies waiting for me to escape the 60h crunchweeks, and I've got hopes for another 'round the patreon' hood-drop once the production quirks are sorted.

Stay tuned and stay alive, y'all!

May the pun

First off, a few new faces! Welcome! Out of curiosity - was it the linktree that led you here?

On to business: the oven fuckup was an unexpected headache. If you missed the FB posts, basically the thermostat broke somehow and the oven over-heated. I got lucky in that only a few of the molds melted. By now I've managed to fix the oven (by sourcing a replacement and driving for 6h) and new molds are on the way, but hurgh planned-schedule-setbacks.

We're getting close to the usual su...

Easter eggdrops

Happy easter folks! Alright, realtalk on plans y'all. Let me know if I've missed something, yeah? Ideas and suggestions welcome, 'cause we're in the deep end of latex mask RnD here :)

After finishing the white kit, I can conclude...

- the suit manufacturing method works well enough

- the basic suit design is ok

- i'm mediocre at painting

- ...and most importantly, the mask is turning into the weak link, both literally and figuratively

...

march misc~

Things are going well! 

Suitwise, the retry on the white came out great. A few more and I may even start feeling confident?!

Hoods & misc, as you can see the paint technique is a challenge. I've gone through many experiments like the pictured one, but I think I've nailed it now! Also production machinery building 'cause I can't do a slow enough bath-exit manually. Should drop the defects to near zero, which has me psyched! I'll add more colors etc asap if it pans out, alt...

New year, fresh energies!

'Allo folks, and welcome to 2021! Everyone alive and well, yeah?

Right now I'm burning most of my brainpower on building/improving production machinery for the workshop, but I couldn't resist side-projecting a new face. Modelling during work-meetings is zen'y cyberloafing, y'know! 

This is a fun example for many reasons - snagged a reasonably well-sculpted 3d-model of Jennifer Lawrence, and did a quick-fit. A bit of jawline re-sculpting and minor nose-bridge thickening to fit...

Merry christmas!

Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart, for your support during the "wonder-year" of 2020. With the ridiculous amount of hours I spend fighting with these things in the workshop, it feels good to know I'm not alone in my quest :)

I'm still amazed over how well the latest suit works! 90% of the durability is solved, just gotta' figure out the details on the foam-face handling and we hit 100%. Then I can focus on production methods and aesthetics. It seems quite reasonable with the or...

12h well spent

I am the god of glue!!!!

Worth it, now that I'm reasonably confident in the combo of looks and durability :)

A few days of work to go, then we'll see if it lives up to the hype!

fresh suit, still drying!

Latest cast went GREAT! So psyched, finally closing in on 'acceptable' quality levels! Finishing it up over the weekend, hopefully :)

December's going to be a busy workshop month omg!

November november the fifth of december

Slow times :)

New hoodmolds are coming along slowly but steadily.
* Adding an inbetween'er between the current S/M, so I'll have to start renaming things
* Adding wider-necked hoods for non-lollipop people.
* Miscellaneous fixes and tweaks

I'm itching to make gloves/socks and completely different hood models (faces, non-elfy ears, ...) but there's only so much time and workshop space at one time.  Anything in particular y'all would like to see?

Suit-wise, I c...

latest suit prototype

Tested the butt-elf this weekend, and jfc the badonkadonk on it. Shopped away the workshop background because eh it's already silly

Going to try a less ridiculous butt on the next one, and hopefully nail down the last surface problems! Will probably take more than one run, but still progress to be had :)

October is the best month convince me otherwise

Sneak-peek ahoy! I dare say it's a big step ahead. Still not perfect, but significantly fewer surface problems! I'll probably be accused of being artistic with the purple-red'ish tattoos too, but in reality I had run out of black sheet latex without noticing o_o

Next week's store update will be mainly different base colors, with perhaps one or two simple paintjobs. I'm slowly prepping additional base models, but that'll be november at the earliest.

Things are moving forwards, and ...

Things to come~

First off - surface issues probably solved, mold cleanup->fixing->casting ahoy! Will take me until late september since the day-job is a bit hectic right now, but hell yes!

Immediate suitwork aside, I feel we've been getting closer and closer to something that's actually viable. I spent a chunk of time in august trying to figure out the big picture. I think I've landed on a solid, sustainable path (with very rough dates that'll be subject to change as things evolve):

- 20Q4:...

august times!

'Allo folks, welcome to season 2! Kept quiet but busy over summer with boring behind-the-scenes-stuff in the workshop. Tweaked molds, remodelled the place to make room for better casting, etc etc. I also spent four days patching foam pieces for this mold... and then it got ruined by coagulant slippage. Fun times, but it gave me ideas for how to do it properly once and for all so I'm psyched!

I've started prepping a webshop too! Going to start with simple hoods soon to get the ball rolli...

"have you tried turning it upside down?"

Back to suitwork after all the side-wrapups! First a load of misc tech-fixes and experiments, then hopefully a proper upgraded suitcast in late july. I'm not getting much of a tan this year it seems... :)