We were lucky to catch up with Hayley Sonnier recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hayley, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

I jumped into the world of resin work during the pandemic, when it became one of those hobbies that a lot of people were picking up at home. We were staying inside, playing more of our D&D games than ever before, and it grew quickly from just a small hobby to a major creative outlet. Most of what I learned came from trial and error, testing things, having crazy ideas and sitting down to see if I could turn them into a reality. What I couldn’t figure out on my own I could learn from the growing community of dice makers learning and experimenting alongside me. It was such a phenomenon in our little corner of the internet for several years, and it was a joy to get in on the early stages of that to watch the craft and the hobby grow from the ground up.
I realized very quickly that resin is not a small craft, it’s one that requires a lot of tools and equipment, especially to do it right and do it safely. It wasn’t until I was able to really dedicate studio space to it that I think it was able to take off as much as it has.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m Hayley, and I spend part of every day hand-crafting resin dice for tabletop RPG games like Dungeons and Dragons. I make functional art, most often inspired by the stories and characters we bring to life in our own games. I’ve been running an online shop for several years now, along with a Patreon and Discord server where we make exclusive dice, get way too invested in fictional lesbians in armor, and print so many stickers of swords.

I do every part of the process of making our dice, from 3D printing the masters, making silicone molds, and casting and finishing the final product. It’s a labor of love that I do nearly full-time, with the help of my wonderfully supportive husband and two very fluffy cats.

A big part of what we do beyond just resin crafting is story telling. My husband and I run weekly D&D games and from those campaigns come most of our ideas for dice, little fragments of the stories we tell captured in resin. We’ve been so lucky to have wonderful players and DMs over the years that have given us so much creative inspiration. We have characters who have gone on epic adventures, experienced love and loss, victory and defeat, and whose stories have made homes in our souls. Making dice is one of our outlets to take all that inspiration and create something beautiful out of the stories we’ve been fortunate enough to tell, and then they go on to the hands of other excited storytellers. There’s nothing I love more than to hear back from our customers about moments that happen at their own game tables that our dice played a part in making happen.

We’re known as Soulforge Dice, inspired by a deity of craftmanship and the soul, who gathers to her followers whose purpose and calling in life is to create and invent and improve themselves through their craftsmanship, an idea I hope I can embody with what I create.

At the end of the day though, we’re just nerds who love to roll dice and tell stories, and I think there’s something truly magical about the fact that I get to be a part of so many other stories through the dice we create.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I really can’t overstate how grateful I am for the way that my art gets to be a part of other people’s experiences. It’s different from other mediums, that might get hung on the wall and appreciated as a piece of décor. The dice we make are intended to be used, functional pieces of art that themselves get to go on adventures. People often pick dice that match the characters they play or the feeling of the adventure they’re on. And most of what we make are designs inspired by the stories I’ve told myself. Each one of them gets to be treasured and rolled and play a part in the adventures that our customers go on.

So often I hear back from people who get to tell me about a moment in a game where the dice we made for them rolled well (or sometimes poorly, as it goes) and how it helped shape the story in a new direction or let them experience something amazing. That’s a unique joy for me to feel like I get to be included in so many stories all over the world.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

We first turned this business into a hobby in 2020, and I think the push to make it something that could support us in such a tough time was… honestly it was insane.

We found ourselves on the brink of being homeless when the pandemic hit in full force in 2020. We spent a month living in my best friend’s basement, tying up loose ends, before packing everything we owned into a moving truck and driving from Oregon to Southern Louisiana with two very confused cats. And then, I couldn’t find a job. We were making ends meet with my husband’s work and unemployment, but I needed SOMETHING. So I took the leap and started looking at making what was a hobby into, possibly, my job.

I turned down a job offer that I received a few months into this journey, as I found myself at a crossroads of being a full-time creative or going back to the regular work force. But I did what felt like the crazy thing at the time, and now here we are, four years later. When I look back at what I was making four years ago, I can’t help but laugh to think that *that* was enough to start a business with. My art has grown in leaps and bounds as I’ve had the freedom to sink all of my time and energy into it.

But I think just having the courage to TRY it, to take the leap and give it a chance, was terrifying but it’s been one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://soulforgedice.com
• Instagram: @soulforge.dice
• Other: Patreon: hwww.patreon.com/soulforgedice

Image Credits

Portrait photos by Cayla Zeek