About

Flightless Designs was started in response to increased requests for quality props – especially and specifically wing sets. This is a stab at making props and costume pieces full time.

I work out of my home in hot, humid North Texas. Here is an image of the garage, where I make most of my precious metal pieces and go about sawing, measuring, painting, and generally working with the big stuff or “things for which ventilation is needed”. As you can see it has been recently cleaned and is pre-project sparkling. This is NOT its normal state. The chair is for my husband, who frequently likes to chat me up while I’m trying to concentrate.

This is where the sweat was put into “sweatshop”.

As you can see, this is a one-woman operation.

I do this because it is my passion in life. I will only sell things I am happy enough to use myself, and I try to price things fairly for the work put into them, as well as the material cost. Many people are surprised at how much materials will cost, or the cost of handcrafted items, so let me give you an example:

I have made a mass-producible item out of urethane foam in the past. The supplies cost me $110, and were enough to produce 25 items. Some of these items of course, did not come out properly due to air bubbles or material mixing issues. Let’s say only 20 of the 25 possible come out correctly. That means the price of each item in materials is $110/20, which is $5.50. Fair enough, right? That gets the material money back, if you sell all 20 items. This does not include the solid 72 hours that were spent creating the object, the master mold, and the replications. If you make $10 an hour at a “real job”, and apply that idea to this, you add $720 to the cost. This makes the equation ($110+$720)/20, which is $41.50. Now you begin to see the idea behind why handcrafted items cost so much. Don’t quit your day job, folks. :)

I hope you enjoy rambling around the site! Please feel free to ask questions, comment, or suggest anything you like (within reason – be polite!).