#leather tooling

[leatherbutchblues]

I created this banner as a love letter to leatherdykes 🖤⛓️🩸

Handcrafted from a solid piece of leather, metal O-rings and chain, the banner is designed to embody the leather armour worn by these fierce guardians who strengthen and protect our communities.

If you’re interested in seeing more of my work please check out my IG @leatherbutch

[runawaymarbles]

Fanbinding(ish): Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

Leather on bookboard, with hot foil stamping on the spine. The endpapers are a Japanese wave design, partially as a reference to Canaan House being on the water, and is also a reference to the fact that this book was a birthday present for @eebeesee, who is a giant weeb. (Fun fact: I bought that paper in 2012 and have been waiting uh, 11 years, to find the perfect project for it.)

Process under the cut.

Remember two months ago when I said I wasn't wild about doing another paperback-to-hardback conversion? Well. More fool me. (I did try and find a sewn hardback to take apart, but apparently this book was not sold as a sturdy hardback. Cue rant.)

I've tried debossing with leather before, so obviously, for embossing, I decided I'd just pick the most complicated design possible. I had to modify the skull a bit--taking out the IX, which did NOT cut well, and I had to make the lines around the glasses thicker.

After several hours of cricut cutting and experimentation, here is the cover pre-leather. (I also had to floss the skull's teeth with an awl to get some fuzz out, which I found very funny.)

Then, leather:

As you can see, I lose a lot of details in the teeth there, so I went around the edges with a heated brass stylus.

I bought a special skull stamp for the spine: it definitely wasn't made for heat, because while it did serve the purpose, it also came with a metal handle which made handling it awkward. (Oven mitts did not give me the necessary amount of dexterity. I ended up sort of wrapping a paper towel around the handle. My cousin has since informed me that we do own fire resistant gloves, but I did not remember this at the time.)

The stamp was also a pain to get even: it had to be at juuuuust the right temperature and pressure, or you'd either get too much or too little, as shown. It was also pretty picky about foil, but the brass color matched the endband cloth and insides best anyway, so that worked out. (White was a definite no.)

The other fun bit of this was doing the edges: I did them with black foil, but as we established in my earlier foiling experiments, that's not the most reliable. I think I got the best results so far on the top, but kept getting flakes on the others. I ended up painting the outside edge with ink, and then foiling on top of that. The bleed onto the pages ended up looking pretty neat, but since I hadn't done it on the top, I didn't do it on the bottom so that it wouldn't look weird on the inside. I'm not sure the foil added as much gloss as I was hoping for so next time I might just do the ink.

It did mean that I had to separate all the pages twice; I ended up bringing this to my girlfriend's haircut appointment and working on it in the corner. I hope it was the most strangely specific thing the stylist had seen someone doing when they tagged along.

[cicada-heart]

handmade cecropia moth purse by malevolent leather ✨

[punchspeedchunk]

I went to work all day so I got home at 6:15, I'm in a crafting fugue frenzy and I'm so tired and I have one more day to finish this piece for the Easter Show craft competition and I am so anxious and so elated and I haven't felt this level of artistic flow since I first made my Transformer Cosplay Rigs.

Like I wondered where this version of me went, it's been so long since I took on something this ambitious and ran it up to the wire so hard. It's aweful and it's awesome and my house smells of leather which is FANTASTIC.

Anyway have some progress pics I gotta have this bitch done by Saturday morning to drop off before 3PM. My energy is very much a mixture of Muse's 2012 Olympics anthem and No Time No Shield from Cybernator.

[chaotic-ppeach]

If y’all want a leather firefly wallet, here’s the link!

https://www.etsy.com/listing/4438564544/?ref=share_ios_native_control

[armory-rasa]

WIP pic of my current project -- the walls at our new (much larger) place are extremely bare, so I took one of my favorite pieces by Vitor Gonzales and adapted it for carving in leather. 18" diameter, out of 10-oz veg-tan. The tooling took about nine hours all told; haven't decided yet how I'm going to dye it to best bring out the design.

Not for sale -- this was done entirely for my own enjoyment, though I may find some royalty-free designs to make similar pieces available in my shop.

[memetrash-coyote]

I needed something to hold my mallets for Sunday, so of course, I made a thing lol. I like how it went from a Victorian vibe to a hippie vibe with the colors. Maybe I'll do another in green 🤔

[thebinarybookbinder]

Practicing leather tooling, not too terrible for my 2nd ever real attempt!