I’ve completed my Christmas gifts for my players: hollow book dice holders.
It’s taken me several months, chipping away a little at time, making mistakes, starting over, and figuring out how to improve.
I started with some Elderwood spellbook foam. I then picked out appropriately sized books at the thrift store. This proved more time consuming than I anticipated, as I found myself worrying not just about the dimensions of the book, but also the titles! I didn’t want to stuff dice into some gardening book!
I spent a fair amount of time reading and researching how to cut the books. I ruined four of them teaching myself different techniques; and although I’ve succeeded in my project, I wouldn’t call these particularly high quality.
I tried a jigsaw (without a jig), as well as a box cutter. On some of them I polished up the cuts with a RotoZip. I found the books really hard to clamp down for the jigsaw, and the blade guard on the saw made some of the cuts along the spine really challenging. The speed with which the jigsaw cuts was almost entirely offset by fiddling with clamps, re-clamping, adjusting, etc.
(Obligatory disclaimer that I have basically zero experience with any power tools, so this was quite the stretch project! 
)
The box cutter actually works really well, but obviously takes a lot more time and physical effort. The cuts also tend to shear a bit, resulting in a very uneven internal frame. It’s super hard to get a consistent cut lined up through a hundred or more pages by hand!
This one stores less dice, but includes a little rolling area. It’ll be interesting to see if this actually gets used. It’s such a small space.
I tried to find some illuminated manuscript style borders to mount over the cavity in the appropriate theme for my game. These really help cover up the imperfections. I left them black-and-white so that their owners could color them in as they desire.
Hard to tell from the photos, but the left page of each is a sheet from a Rocketbook Everlast notebook. These things are great. I’m including the necessary FriXion pen to use on this, to make it a perfectly reusable. (Although upon reflection, I did cut off the QR code from the Everlast sheet, so they aren’t usable with the digital component of that product… Something to remember for version 2!)
All that’s left is to load them with an assortment of gift dice, wrap them, and then wait until Christmas!
