Brian's Blog

No, not that kind of leather!

It's been quite a few years since I've plied the craft and I have to say I missed it. Way back when I was a Boy Scout (yeah, I know I'm even geekier than you thought!) I was introduced to leather carving while working on the various requisite merit badges for Eagle Scout. After that I didn't work leather for something on the order of 10 years but then returned to the hobby in my late 20s. Not long after that Tandy Leather disappeared from the face of the earth. Tandy Leather, by the way, is a local company that sells leather, supplies, and a multitude of tools to work leather into useful things. When they went out of business I stopped working with leather because of the inconvenience of buying leather on line and the fact that you don't know what quality you are going to get in a skin. Well, I was quite happy when my wife pointed out that Tandy Leather has opened up again and has a store about 5 minutes from my house! It turns out that another company bought up the previous version of Tandy Leather Company, changed the name to Tandy Leather Factory, and decided to open stores up in all the cities where they originally were.

In about 1997 or so I made my wife a nice carved purse which she has used hard and it's showing wear. It's been repaired multiple times and, even though she loves it, she has decided to retired it for fear of ruining it entirely. So, she put me to the task of making her a new purse. I just finished the new one this weekend and have a picture of it here in this post. The only thing I don't like about the way it turned out is the highlighting came out sort of swirly rather than the smooth even color it should have been. I'm not sure why it turned out this way as I did a dry run of the finishing process on another piece of leather to make sure something crazy wouldn't happen on the real article. Depending on ones point of view it makes it look somewhat antiqued which is a kind of nice look. Either way, I don't think it turned out hideous. What do you think?

Since I can actually get back into this hobby again I've made a gallery to show off pictures of things I make. Thus far it only has pics of my wife's old purse and her new one. Go here if you'd like a closer look at what I've done so far. Somewhere or another I think I have printed pictures of other things I've done. If I can manage to find them and if time permits I may scan them in and put them up also.