NOTE: the opinions expressed in interviews are those of the guests, not necessarily those of shadomain.com.
Today we talk to Arielle Milstein-Brennan from Fantastic Knickknackery about vending at game conventions. You can find her at
https://www.instagram.com/aaaaaaarielle
https://bsky.app/profile/arielleishere.bsky.social
Let’s get to the questions!
Tell us about your shop: What’s it called, what kind of items do you sell, and where can we find it online?
My shop is Fantastic Knickknackery! I use my human brain and hands to design and make trinkets like wooden dice, hand-painted tote bags, lino prints, stickers, enamel pins, ornaments, lanyards, buttons, just ALL the bits and bobs that I can make with my little goblin hands! I have an online shop (ariellemilstein.com, but fantasticknickknackery.com also redirects there, if you can spell it right!) A lot of my stuff is up there, but if you ever see something at a con and don’t see it on my website, it’s only because so much of what I make is one-of-a-kind and hard to list online. I’m always happy to chat and ship something out if you missed out at a con or saw a photo online, even if there’s no official listing on my shop!
Tell us about some of your favorite products in your shop, as well as what some of your best sellers are.
One of my pieces (or I guess technically two, but they kind of go together) are my 8×10 prints of extinct and endangered animals that I illustrated as a little gallery of fancy portraits. They’re called “Distinguished Extinction” and “Endangered Dandies” and I am literally obsessed with them. They’re honestly far from being best sellers but I don’t even care because I love them. I also have a few of them as stickers and gorgeous double-rainbow tea towels that my incredible friends Inkling Print Co. screenprinted for me! Some of my other favorites are my wood dice. I love how incredibly detailed I’m able to get with my laser, and drawing the designs for them is so rewarding! And since I engrave everything myself right in my little one-bedroom apartment vs. sending them out to be made in a factory, I can just have an idea, design it on my laptop, and have the dice in my grubby little hands within an hour! It also means that I can accidentally end up with, say, hypothetically, 10+ different designs of dice and nowhere to display them all, and then spend three weeks creating an entire papier mache tree out of cardboard and newspaper with little mushroom cups to hold each design so people can see all of their different options! Y’know, hypothetically. I could go on forever about all my favorite products because I made them all!! My lino prints that I carved with tiny knives and printed with pretty colored inks! My enamel pins that I may not have physically made myself but I drew every tiny little strawberry seed and speck of gold coin, poured over the Pantone colors until I found the exact shade I wanted! But I have, shocking no one, been told in the past that I can get carried away, so I’ll try to contain myself and move on.
How did you get interested in vending at PAX? What’s the experience like having a booth and being on the show floor all weekend?
My husband Casey and I attended the very fi rst PAX Unplugged back in 2017 and had a BLAST. We went again in 2018 and he actually proposed to me there! So we’ve got lots of love for PAX! We vended at our first con in 2022: RTX in Austin, TX, which was incredibly fun, because we were huge fans. That same year we dove right in and vended at both Unplugged and East, and we’ve been coming back ever since! Vending at a con is vastly different from attending, but I absolutely adore it. Not only do we get to have a home base, but I get to share my art with hundreds of people who wouldn’t otherwise have ever gotten to enjoy it! We’ve made tons of friends and connections through vending, and have even gotten to meet a bunch of people we’re fans of! We do miss getting to go to panels, play games, and get autographs, but I wouldn’t give it up for anything. It’s absolutely back-breaking, exhausting labor, and we both barely make it out alive each con, but I LIVE for it. (I’m Tinkerbell; I need positive attention to survive.) People coming up to me all day, wearing earrings I made or showing me photos of their home with my art framed on their walls? Telling me stories of gifting my art to their loved ones? I’ve signed AUTOGRAPHS for a non-zero number of people. I have cried MULTIPLE times over people’s kindness. I had a streamer I’m a fan of search out my booth because she’d heard from a friend that she’d like my stuff , and then she bought a lanyard with MY art on it! I am constantly bonding with people over our shared neurodivergences (did I mention that I sell a whole slew of little neurospicy/neurosparkly-themed buttons?) So yeah, it can be a bit of a bummer missing out on the rest of PAX, obviously, but everyone is SO amazing, I still get my Pinny trading in, I still get to do some trinket trading, and I still get my absolute fill of wonderful lovely people coming to me to visit and fi ll my little Tinkerbell heart with joy!!
What’s the most challenging part of having a gaming-related shop/website?
Honestly, having ANY small business right now (and I’m talking a true small business, not “our small business of 500 employees”) is nigh impossible. Casey and I are substitute teachers most of the time, and for conventions, we really only do PAX Unplugged and East. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you or anyone else about the state of the country and world right now. We’re just doing our best and trying to make ends meet. Too many of my incredible artist friends have had to shut down their shops in favor of more stable work, and it’s an absolute loss. I wish we lived in a society that valued art and artists and honestly, just human beings as a whole. But that’s maybe a different conversation!
Speaking of gaming, what are some of your favorite games to play (ttrpg/board games/video games)?
I’m actually about to wrap up a DnD campaign that’s been going since 2021! We’re level 17 and we only get to play about once a month, so we’re all SUPER excited about approaching this endgame. I grew up on a steady stream of word games, so I love a good Scrabble, Boggle, Bananagrams, this card game called Smerge that may actually be out of print at this point, so I guard my two copies aggressively. I’m obsessed with Potion Explosion and Fresco; I love a good game with a thousand tiny pieces. Taboo and Cranium are perfect for big groups, and I have some hilarious memories of playing them with my family as a kid. Telephone Pictionary (DIY with paper and pencil, basically Gartic Phone, but we were doing it way earlier) is also one of my go-tos for a party, but I’m VERY strict about the reveal at the end: you MUST take turns! I also love collaborative games where it’s everyone against a common enemy or even no enemy at all, just a common goal. As for video games, I’m super uncoordinated so I like to play pretty simple games like Minecraft, Fall Guys, and Animal Crossing. I also really loved this little game called Carto! And I went FERAL for Human Fall Flat because I got to play it with Casey. I do love backseat “playing” games with him where I get to enjoy the story and gameplay without having to worry about any of the buttons, so I’m also a huge fan of Halo, Fallout, the Witcher, and Baldur’s Gate 3.
Do the games you enjoy playing influence the products you make to sell?
Oh, 100%! A TON of what I make is TTRPG-related, mainly polyhedral-dice-themed. I’ve loved DnD ever since I first stumbled on my first episode of Critical Role back in 2015, made THE FIRST dice jail in existence (no, really!) and never looked back! I’m a certified dice goblin, and I assume that everyone I interact with is as well, or at least LIKES dice. My lifelong love of Scrabble even influenced one of my wood d6 designs (the numbers one through six spelled out in letter tiles on each face!). All of my art is just stuff that I like, and I just hope that other people will like it too!
What else would you like readers to know about you and your shop?
I just want everyone to know that everything they see of my art, every line, every dot, every millimeter of EVERY design came from me and my hands. Nothing is automatic, CERTAINLY nothing is “generated” (ew). It’s all just me. An autistic, ADHD, chronically ill (I literally have a migraine right now, barely held at bay with meds) woman, absolutely poor as hell, a substitute teacher in a high school when I’m not making and selling art, literally just doing my best to leave the world a better place than I found it.
Thanks Arielle! If you’d like to do a Q&A here, please send an email to shadomainrpg@gmail.com. We’d love to hear enyone’s opinion form new players to grizzled veterans.
About The Author
