I've recently mentioned that last year was an awesome chipping year for me, I ended up with 5 really nice new sets (Mixed Paulson set, Boardwalks, CPC Black Sands and the Starburst/Mixed Casino $1s set I posted the other). This is the last set that I received last year but it's the one I was most excited to finally get as it was a long time in the making. I've been playing cards off and on since college, but really got heavier into poker and chipping about 10 years ago. A couple of years into the hobby I picked up my first "premium" set, which was when Apache was running a sale on the Paulson Private Cardrooms. It was my first experience with hot stamped chips and I really dug them (still do - while I no longer have that particular tourney set, I do still have a nice PCR cash set). About the same time, I was making my way through another read of my favorite book, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I first read through the Lord of the Rings (and subsequently The Hobbit) in 7th grade and have been hooked ever since. I'm a huge fan of the story, I've read through the books a half dozen times and own all the special editions of the movies (nearly 12 glorious hours of film). I've amassed a bunch of paraphernalia over the years, from letter openers to rings to swords and replica maps. Big fan. 
So around the time I picked up the PCRs and was admiring the detail on the hot stamps, I was reading through the Fellowship of the Ring again. I had the dust cover off the book and noticed the hot stamp on the front cover:
And thought to myself - wow, how badass would it be to get a similar hot stamp on a chip one day? IIRC, this was around the time that Apache still had their custom hot stamping available on the Paulson suits mold (in either PCR, Avalon or GCR colors). For as much as I liked my PCRs, I didn't think the suits mold would be a good match for the project. There were still a few folks hot stamping, but I ended up procrastinating a bit, and then the hot stamp world went dark (BCC shut down, ASM went Doc Ott, Paulson ceased offering blacks to stamp, CT nose dived and most hot stampers fell off the grid). I figured I lost my window of chance. Fast forward to a couple of years ago. CPC is reborn and announces they'll be offering hot stamping again soon, and a few stampers re-surface with the new surge in the PCF migration. A glimmer of hope returned and the project had some life again. Last December, I reached out to CPC to discuss their stamping options. At the time, they were stamping A Molds, CSQ and HHR. I thought the look of the CSQ would fit with the project, but feel-wise it's not one of my favorite molds. At the same time, I was tooling around online and stumbled back on to holdempokerchips and noticed they still had a pretty good stock of t-molds - one my favorites - in some awesome colors. Stampers were still a bit scarce, but I saw a post from monkeydog that he would be available to start stamping chips, though he was pretty busy and it would take a while. I grabbed a sample set of the t-molds and weighed my options. I knew it would be a while, but in the end I couldn't resist a shot at a custom BCC set.
Onto the design. The plan was for the set to be non-denominated with a different gold stamp on each chip side. My original thoughts on the stamp design were incredibly over-ambitious One was inspired directly from the stamp on the book cover, the eye of Sauron surrounded by the inscription on the ring:
And the other side the symbol of the white tree of Gondor:
Way too detailed to fit cleanly onto a chip. The first was easy enough to simplify - I kept the eye of Sauron and added a simple gold ring around it for the one ring.
The second side was much more difficult to figure out. The tree was too detailed to do properly, so I scrapped that and flipped back through the books to get some new ideas. Nothing jumped out. Then one day, my youngest son & I (who is also a huge LOTR fan) were laying around watching the first Hobbit movie, and at the beginning is the scene where Gandalf leaves a mark on Biblo's door (for the dwarves to find Bilbo's house):
Digging back into the book a bit more, the mark from the movie looks to his first initial - it's a "G" in Tolkien's language of Cirth (the dude invented several languages for his collection of novels). Duh, what's one of the most common things to hot stamp on a chip - initials right? So, instead of Gandalf's symbol, I dug through the LOTR appendices and found the Cirth symbol that would correspond with my last initial "C" (or "K") and surrounded it with the same gold ring surrounding the eye:
Bam, design finished. Now onto the colors. While I didn't have the full array of BCC colors available, I was lucky that HPC had a bunch of great colors to choose from. I wanted to use good rich colors that tied to some of my favorite characters/themes. I went with the earthy dark green for Sam & his garden, royal red and arc yellow for the fires of Sauron's Mount Doom, horizon blue for Gandalf - yes I know he is Gandalf the Grey/White, but fans of the book know his hat is blue and cloak has a blue/grey tint - and I had awesome BCC colors available and didn't want grey chips Breakdown is 200/200/200/100 green/blue/red/yellow for use in either a tournament or cash games.
I ordered the chips from HPC and sent the designs off to monkeydog to do his thing. He finished up a right around Thanksgiving and these babies arrived in early December, just in time for one of my holiday cash games.
Big thanks to @MSPatton for making these t-molds available, and especially @monkeydog for doing a great job with getting dies made and the stamping. Also a quick shout-out to @courage, whom I bounced numerous hot stamping questions pertaining to his awesome Club Courage set, which helped a bunch with a lot of decisions.
Onto the pr0n:
Some shots with Glamdring
So around the time I picked up the PCRs and was admiring the detail on the hot stamps, I was reading through the Fellowship of the Ring again. I had the dust cover off the book and noticed the hot stamp on the front cover:And thought to myself - wow, how badass would it be to get a similar hot stamp on a chip one day? IIRC, this was around the time that Apache still had their custom hot stamping available on the Paulson suits mold (in either PCR, Avalon or GCR colors). For as much as I liked my PCRs, I didn't think the suits mold would be a good match for the project. There were still a few folks hot stamping, but I ended up procrastinating a bit, and then the hot stamp world went dark (BCC shut down, ASM went Doc Ott, Paulson ceased offering blacks to stamp, CT nose dived and most hot stampers fell off the grid). I figured I lost my window of chance. Fast forward to a couple of years ago. CPC is reborn and announces they'll be offering hot stamping again soon, and a few stampers re-surface with the new surge in the PCF migration. A glimmer of hope returned and the project had some life again. Last December, I reached out to CPC to discuss their stamping options. At the time, they were stamping A Molds, CSQ and HHR. I thought the look of the CSQ would fit with the project, but feel-wise it's not one of my favorite molds. At the same time, I was tooling around online and stumbled back on to holdempokerchips and noticed they still had a pretty good stock of t-molds - one my favorites - in some awesome colors. Stampers were still a bit scarce, but I saw a post from monkeydog that he would be available to start stamping chips, though he was pretty busy and it would take a while. I grabbed a sample set of the t-molds and weighed my options. I knew it would be a while, but in the end I couldn't resist a shot at a custom BCC set.
Onto the design. The plan was for the set to be non-denominated with a different gold stamp on each chip side. My original thoughts on the stamp design were incredibly over-ambitious
One was inspired directly from the stamp on the book cover, the eye of Sauron surrounded by the inscription on the ring:And the other side the symbol of the white tree of Gondor:
Way too detailed to fit cleanly onto a chip. The first was easy enough to simplify - I kept the eye of Sauron and added a simple gold ring around it for the one ring.
The second side was much more difficult to figure out. The tree was too detailed to do properly, so I scrapped that and flipped back through the books to get some new ideas. Nothing jumped out. Then one day, my youngest son & I (who is also a huge LOTR fan) were laying around watching the first Hobbit movie, and at the beginning is the scene where Gandalf leaves a mark on Biblo's door (for the dwarves to find Bilbo's house):
Digging back into the book a bit more, the mark from the movie looks to his first initial - it's a "G" in Tolkien's language of Cirth (the dude invented several languages for his collection of novels). Duh, what's one of the most common things to hot stamp on a chip - initials right? So, instead of Gandalf's symbol, I dug through the LOTR appendices and found the Cirth symbol that would correspond with my last initial "C" (or "K") and surrounded it with the same gold ring surrounding the eye:
Bam, design finished. Now onto the colors. While I didn't have the full array of BCC colors available, I was lucky that HPC had a bunch of great colors to choose from. I wanted to use good rich colors that tied to some of my favorite characters/themes. I went with the earthy dark green for Sam & his garden, royal red and arc yellow for the fires of Sauron's Mount Doom, horizon blue for Gandalf - yes I know he is Gandalf the Grey/White, but fans of the book know his hat is blue and cloak has a blue/grey tint - and I had awesome BCC colors available and didn't want grey chips
Breakdown is 200/200/200/100 green/blue/red/yellow for use in either a tournament or cash games.I ordered the chips from HPC and sent the designs off to monkeydog to do his thing. He finished up a right around Thanksgiving and these babies arrived in early December, just in time for one of my holiday cash games.
Big thanks to @MSPatton for making these t-molds available, and especially @monkeydog for doing a great job with getting dies made and the stamping. Also a quick shout-out to @courage, whom I bounced numerous hot stamping questions pertaining to his awesome Club Courage set, which helped a bunch with a lot of decisions.
Onto the pr0n:
Some shots with Glamdring
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