Store-bought fandom jewelry comes two ways. Licensed and $80, or cheap alloy that turns your neck green by Tuesday. There’s a third way. Make it yourself. It’s cheaper than it sounds and less finicky than it used to be.
Desktop laser engravers — the same enclosed boxes people use for cosplay props and D&D terrain — can etch clean, permanent designs into metal blanks. That means pendants, rings, dog tags, and pins in whatever sigil, house words, or in-joke your corner of fandom runs on. No licensing department. No “we don’t make that crest, here’s the main logo instead.”
What You Can Make
Pendants with a faction crest, a rune, or coordinates to a place that doesn’t exist (yes, people do Rivendell).
Stacked rings with a line of dialogue small enough that only you know it’s there.
Stainless dog tags with a character’s stat block or a bit of quest text.
Pin-style badges, minus the enamel, for con lanyards and jacket flair.
Keyrings with a guild name, for a group that will absolutely lose them.
Matching pieces for a duo or a whole party. Friendship bracelets, but they look good.
The Gear
To mark metal you need an infrared laser — either fiber or IR-diode. A plain blue-diode engraver handles wood and acrylic fine, but it mostly just annoys stainless steel. Many current desktop units include both, so one box covers props and jewelry.
When you shop, the question that matters is whether it comes with an IR module. That’s what decides whether it works as a jewelry engraving machine or just a wood toy.
Blanks in brass, aluminum, and stainless are cheap in bulk, which helps, because your first several will be practice. Expect to burn through a dozen before your settings feel dialed in.
Design Notes From Someone Who Scorched a Lot of Brass
Keep it bold. Thin serif text and hairline art vanish at pendant size. Chunky runes, silhouettes, and single words hold up.
Vectorize your art before you import it. A blurry PNG engraves like a blurry PNG.
Test settings on a scrap blank every time you change metal. The power that gives a clean mark on stainless barely scratches anodized aluminum.
“Can I Sell These?”
Original designs and generic fantasy — runes, moons, d20s, crests you made up — are fine. Plenty of people run a con-table side hustle on exactly this kind of original work.
Recognizable IP is a legal gray-to-black zone, and the rights holders have lawyers who bill more per hour than your whole setup cost. Parody and “transformative” work sits in a legal no man’s land that no comment thread will settle for you.
Is It Worth It?
If you already want a laser for armor, prop weapons, or terrain, the jewelry side is close to free. Same machine, smaller blanks. If you only want one necklace, commission someone on Etsy and skip the learning curve.
But if you’ve ever stood in a dealer’s hall thinking “I would buy that if it existed for my blorbo,” the machine that fixes that is now the size of a microwave.
Don’t blame us when your whole table shows up in matching engraved doom.
