In 2023, Madi started working on a baby blanket during her maternity leave following the birth of our first baby together in September of that year - reactivating the dormant skills that she had originally picked up in 2018.

The goal was to make the baby something handmade and personal. So, Madi set out to make a baby blanket as a gift for Christmas 2023. Madi dusted off her crochet hook, picked out some cozy, cuddly, quirky yarn, and fell back in love with the craft!

Sometime around this time, we started to play TTRPGs as a family with our older children. Madi decided that she would crochet herself a personalized dice bag, a mushroom of her own design. Then, Luke asked for a red panda-coded hat, which Madi paired with a red panda-coded dice bag to fit his many, many, MANY dice. Following this, our eldest child’s birthday rolled around, and a red dragonborn-coded dice bag was needed. Madi expanded to make mushroom-themed hats for herself and the baby, and then a mushroom-themed bag for our TTRPG party’s druid, as by now our games have expanded to include close family friends.

With the new baby (not planned, fyi- nat 1 rolled?) at home and no real local support to care for the baby (too much geological distance between us, and our families, and all of our friends working full time), we decided to try to start a business! At this time, we had big ideas for a bistro/cafe with community-building at its heart. We had planned to start by operating a home bakery, as this was Madi’s professional training. However, we were turned down by our local farmer’s markets (major nat 1 rolled here!).

Yet, with so much praise coming from friends, family, and random people on the street (“hey, nice hat. Where can I get one?”, “Is that a Mario-flying-raccoon hat? Cool.”), it was then that we realized that Madi had a natural talent for crochet. So, we decided to try a crochet booth at our local farmer’s market in the face of our home bakery not getting accepted, and this idea was accepted by the market runners!

Seeing as we are big enthusiasts of TTRPGs, and given that we had recently been experiencing a lot of difficult situations (we like to think of them as us rolling nat 1’s in real life), we decided that the business had to have this in the name because, even though a nat 1 is an instant failure in (some) TTRPG's, these failures often are the very things that make playing so much fun and interesting! So why not apply this philosophy to real life?

At the end of our first market year in 2024, Madi was having a hard time keeping the business stocked by herself, so Luke taught himself crochet using a popular brand of prepackaged beginner crochet kits with a vast library of interactive online videos and started adding products himself, as well as adding original artwork to the mix.

We find inspiration in nature, gaming, fantasy, and (Madi at least) ANYTHING Halloweeny. We hope that you can find something to connect with in our products.

Every purchase is greatly appreciated and helps support our nerdy, spooky, and silly family. We also appreciate the interest and curiosity of everyone that we have had the privilege to interact with.

The past few years of working in markets, meeting face-to-face with customers —old and new —talking about nerdy/spooky/crafty/silly things with everyone we meet have been, and continue to be so much fun!