An Interview with Lyndsay from Dragon Chow Dice Bags

Number of Views :1031

Yesterday I interviewed Lyndsay Peters of Dragon Chow Dice Bags, a small little company that designs unique dice bags for gamers. Here it is!

Dice Monkey: What are Dragon Chow Dice Bags, and what makes them different than others you can find in the store?

Red ZOOM and Solid Red dice bag, a standard sized dice bag.

Lyndsay: Dragon Chow Dice Bags is my pet project! I hand-sew reversible drawstring dice bags. Each dice bag has a unique flat-bottomed design that makes it stand up on the gaming table, so that your dice don’t spill everywhere and knock over your minis and pencils and taquitoes and Lord-knows-what-else. As you can see, choosing another bag surely results in gaming disaster.

I offer three styles of dice bag in my standard stock.

Teeny Tiny dice bags are a good size to hold a set of polyhedral dice. They’re really, really cute. People actually go ‘awww!’ when they see them on my convention table.

Standard dice bags are the common size. They hold a respectable amount of dice. If at any time you want to know this amount, send me a tweet and I will photograph a dice bag full of dice for you. It’s quite a lot if you want to fill it to the brim.

Tall Pencil Strap dice bags are great because they are simple but they solve the problem of where to put your pencils. They have the same width as a Standard dice bag, but are roughly twice as tall. Inside each one is a strap placed high enough along the bag to hold a mechanical pencil or a pen. I made my tall dice bags because I’d watched a lot of gamers shove pencils into a standard dice bag, which is a recipe for ocular trauma!

Dice Monkey: What gave you the idea for making these professionally?

Lyndsay: I had been sewing and selling purses and wallets on etsy.com, and when I wanted to buy a dice bag for my own D&D-playing uses I realized I couldn’t find one that I was completely in love with. And then, in the back of my head, I heard my mother: “I could make that, and make it better!” And so I moved on from the purses and wallets.

It took me a while to figure out how to get what I wanted to make in my head to actually happen in fabric, and I made many practice dice bags. The original Dragon Chow Dice Bags I sold on Etsy were not the same design as the ones I have now. They’re out there somewhere, probably making their owners happy. But when I got it bang on, my gaming group kind of squeed over them. So I decided to make more and give it a shot.

Deep Space Teeny Tiny Dice Bag

Dice Monkey: What kind of feedback have you gotten on the bags?

Lyndsay: WOW. I’ve had the greatest, greatest feedback. I have met the most special group of geeks on Twitter. I don’t care how silly that sounds – without Twitter, Dragon Chow would not be where it is today! I get customer photos when my dice bags arrive at their homes, and people write about them on their blogs. They really like the hand-written thank you notes that I pack with every bag, and they also sometimes tweet the result of their first roll on the included d20. I have had a lot of geek love showered on me and I hope to meet even more great people!

Dice Monkey: About how long does a bag take to make, start to finish?

Lyndsay: If I were to cut, sew, string and toggle a bag in one go, probably 30-45 minutes. Counting shopping… well, I get distracted in the fabric store. Generally all of my bags are sewn in batches. I can finish a batch of 25 bags in about 3 half-days of work. Once a bag is purchased, I print the shipping label, put the bags in a paper bag wrap, write a thank you note, pick out a matching d20 and include some business cards.

Dice Monkey: Any further plans for the company? Planning on branching out to other products, perhaps?

Lyndsay: I just branched out! Dragon Chow Dice Bags now sells polyhedral dice sets from Koplow Games, which seem to be popular. If people continue to be interested in that I will look at branching out more. Suggestions for products I might be able to carry are always welcome. Dragon Chow Dice Bags owes success to its customers, so having more customers would be excellent.

Dice Monkey: Do you attend a lot of the cons? If so, do you usually get a booth to work in? How has the con experience been for you?

Lyndsay: I hadn’t attended cons until starting Dragon Chow Dice Bags. For a period of time, Dragon Chow Dice Bags had attended more cons than me. In August, my dice bags were at GenCon while I was at home in Canada. This was thanks to @GEEKSOAP and @KyleeLane who are amazing soap-making geeky ladies as well. They very generously shared their convention table space for my dice bags. I have attended two conventions since then as a vendor, and have enjoyed myself so much each time. I look forward to doing more this year, either by sharing table space at conventions far away or by attending nearby conventions myself.

You can chat with Lyndsay on Twitter, or visit her website at DragonChow.com.