With Christmas around the corner, you may want to make a few quick gifts for the young kids in your family:
A small coin pocket that hangs from a lace around the neck.
Their shape is not very crucial, so you can just draw up your own pattern from looking at these pictures. Even the construction of these are not complicated, so just study the pictures and let me know if you have a question.
Tom Evans of Boarshead came up with this idea and I will probably mostly do basketweave backgrounding like this!
This is a piece of leather stamped with the basket weave background and Block-out resist painted on every second line of stamping
After applying Dark Brown Antique Gel
This one was done by Tim: On this piece only the 'tops' of the weave was coated with Block-out. You can still see some spots that have not dried completely.
Medium brown Hi-Lite Stain (Tandy Item #2608-03) made this design come alive.
Here is another one I tried - this time with Super Sheen and a mix of Briar Brown and Raisin Mahogany Eco-Flo Hi-Lite Stain.
This video shows the technique in action:
A newer video about using this technique:
In 2017 I did a Live Video Stream showing the same - it's a bit long because it was live, but could still be usefull!
Here are the first photographs of my latest embossing project: embossing a grey African Hornbil.
The original photo was taken by a school friend of mine, Stephan de Lange.
The first two photos show the design transferred to the leather, cut with a swivel knife and all the key lines beveled. The purpose of this is to be able to see the design outline on the back of the leather. So the leather needs to be well cased - the water has to penetrate right through the thickness of the leather.
The leather used is a 4oz Tooling Cowhide - beautiful soft stuff that 'almost carves itself'!
The beveling shows on the flesh side of the leather.
I trace the plug on a thicker leather and make sure I trace all the important lines of the design so that I have guides to help me sculpt the plug.
After tracing, I cut the plug out smaller than the original design. I reduce the size of the design for the plug by the thickness of the leather that will be over the plug - that piece that I beveled the original design on.
A French Edge Beveler and a scalpel blade are now used to shape the plug - this is done like a panel sculpture and you need to take care to so it with as much perfection as you want to show in the final carving.
Even the slightest bumps show through to the surface. The sharpness of these tools are absolutely crucial to the success of this step.
You will see that I did not include the tail of the bird in the plug - according to the photo the tail is in the background and so I want that to be clearly 'in the background'.
Now the outline on the back of the tooling piece is covered in rubber cement and the plug turned front side down to be glued in place. Carefully place it in the outlines you see at the back. I use rubber cement so that at this point the gluing is not very permanent and you can still move it.
An optional step before this, is to stretch the inside of the design a bit by rolling the leather over a small marble rolling on a flat surface.
