Flower Necklace

There had been a discussion on the Leatherworker's forum about whether you could use a paper diecut machine for leather. I have one of the original Spellbinders Wizard machines so thought I would give it a try since I know that it can handle fairly dense materials. I used the Tim Holtz tattered florals die from Sizzix. I tooled to get more definition and dimension. I coloured the flowers with Copics then antiqued with leather die. The damp leather shaped well and I was pleasantly surprised at how lightweight the final pendant is.

Key tag

Just a little thing I made for my son-in-law using his logo. It was the first time I had done this type of carving. I found that the copic markers worked really well to colour the main figure and the edging.

Luggage tag

When I was planning to use the copics for colouring the leather on the purse flap, I decided to try it out on some scrap leather first. This was belly leather which is not the greatest but it was good enough to practice both the tooling and the colouring. I did learn a lot from this exercise. The tooling made it impossible to groove the stitching line and I should have cut around the patterns on the luggage tag opening more carefully. Actually things were not going too badly until I used the wrong tool to make the holes for stitching, as I was waiting for the correct ones to come. These holes are much too large and really detract from the tooling.

Even though the stitching aggravates me, I did use it when travelling a couple of weeks ago because I do like the tooling.