For years, while working in film, I started making skull cuffs and other film specific designs as wrap gifts for crew, small tokens of appreciation crafted from leftover costuming or prop materials. That's how I fell in love with leatherwork. I came at it sideways at first, using woodworking tools and treating leather like a linocut since the materials behaved similarly. Honestly I still prefer wood carving tools for leather to this day.

While working on a particularly challenging film in 2019 a friend and I decided we would go in on a booth together at a large horror convention and try our hand at producing ourselves.

I started sketching designs and pulling out some of my old prototypes, feverishly testing ideas.

The first draft of Mordrake, a leather skull hair slide paired with a hand-carved faux bone stick, was the same skull design I later used in the rattle bones necklace, but that skull felt too cartoony large scale. I spent weeks tweaking it, adjusting how the bends and curves distort the design, finally using what I know about 3D modeling to correct for distortion. Figuring out the process for making the bones cracked everything open. I suddenly saw a billion possibilities! That process shaped how I approached all my designs.