Jibbi explains how she makes her Warcraft-themed dice bags

Like Warcraft? Like pen-and-paper roleplaying games (or any other dice-centric gaming activity)? Then chances are that you’re already familiar with Dice Bags by Jibbi, where you can buy hand-made dice bags with geeky themes — including Warcraft-themed Horde and Alliance bags. These two bags are made out of velvet — black for Horde and blue for Alliance — with embroidered faction logos adoring the exterior, and a faction-logo fabric lining the interior.

No dice laying around? We bet they’d be stylish ways to hold other knick-knacks, too, all the while showing off your faction pride.

We caught up with Jibbi to see just what goes into making these bags (spoiler: it’s more than you might think).

Blizzard Watch: Why dice bags? How did you get started making them?

Jibbi: I’ve been a hobby machine embroiderer for a long time! I made blankets and put things on assorted scarves and what not — but rarely branched out. The first time we decided to have a guild meet up party at our house, I decided I wanted to make everyone dice bags with our guild logo on them!

Well, it didn’t exactly go to plan — I found out that I had no idea how to get our guild logo into a digital embroidery file so I kind of let it slide for a couple years.

It turns out the software is really expensive and very CAD-like to do well, so I’ve never really learned. I have some access to auto convert some very simple images, but anything more complicated requires someone to pay what’s called a “digitizer,” or, a person that does embroidery digitization.

Finally by the 3rd meetup or so, I was determined – and I did a few tutorials on making the round-bottom bag and just kept tweaking and redoing them until they pleased me! I never made enough in time for the meetup, but the Twitter folks seemed to like them a lot, so I put them up on Etsy.

BW: And, more specifically, why World of Warcraft-themed dice bags?

J: Well I play a Troll mage myself, and my particular circle of Twitter friends is extremely WoW-centric — and once I found Horde and Alliance fabric on Spoonflower (a website where you can take any picture and have it printed on fabric) I knew i wanted to offer really cool WoW bags! I’d had the logos for a very long time and used to make people WoW-themed blankets with their names or toon names on them.

BW: What goes into designing and making one of your dice bags?

J: A lot more than it probably looks, honestly!

Materials include:

• Outer fabric (cut into a rectangle and a circle)
• Inner fabric (same cuts)
• Embroidery stabilizer (a sort of cloth/paper like substance that keeps embroidery looking smooth on fabric)
• Spray adhesive
• Embroidery/sewing machine (I actually have 2, they both do both)
• Embroidery thread in a trillion colors
• Cording (in many colors)
• Beads (silver & gold, that have specific hole sizes for the cording)
• Cord locks/toggles (the spring loaded, 2 holed slidey things that open and close the bag)
• Normal sewing thread (I have to stock every color to match all my exterior fabrics).
• Embroidery design file

The design process usually starts from a particular inspiration, a fabric or color or embroidery design I like, and I work out from there. There’s a lot of ironing, measuring marking, buttonhole making (for the cording), pinning, and of course, embroidering!

BW: How long does it take to make each one?

J: It usually takes about an hour and a half for the WoW bags. If someone requests one with a very complicated, multicolored embroidery design it could take that long in embroidery alone!

I generally sit down for a couple hours and really assembly line them, doing all of one step on all bags and the the next and the next…. you get the idea.

BW: Is there anything you’re working on that we might see soon?

J: I have a file for the Terran logo but not much else in the Blizzard-verse! Generally I get more material as people ask for it.

I find keeping things simple works best for me because I’m kind of a one-person show! I do this in my spare time – by day I’m a .Net Developer and I also run, so my spare time that isn’t raiding or leveling is for sewing!

I’d love to work with a digitizer & an artist to make some class bags in class colors with logos redesigned from the default square ones (like the druid claw, the mage wand, the priest cross, etc). That will be a big investment, though, and this is really the first year the business has been picking up!