leather stamping and four new books

Saturday mornings usually start with a look at my Craigslist app on my phone to scope out the yard sales. This last Saturday was a dreary cold and wet morning and I wasn't too fond of the idea of going out there. But I checked anyway and there was one yard sale in town and the description said "art supplies." As if that wasn't enough, it was only 5 blocks away. So I stumbled out and made my way down there, and low and behold there was a great big box of crafting vegetable tanned leather. Straps, scraps, snaps oh my! For the price of two designer coffee drinks I set myself up with some great stuff.
I dug up my old tools from when I used to do hand tooled copperwork, namely about 20 hand stamps that I made out of old wrenches and a Dremel tool.

These steel stamps are all handmade by me

I figured if they could stamp hard copper, leather shouldn't be a problem, so here's what I did.

Fun stuff! These will be making their way to an Aston Handmade Book near you. Let me know what you think.

My first attempt at stamping leather

I also finished four new books:

red and white linen, leather spine, headband, and GRAPH PAPER!

black and white linen, red suede spine, leather snap strap, blank paper

two tone leather blank journal.

These three are "quarter bound," in other words the spine is leather and a different material than the board covers. The first book has a really nice graph paper.

red, blue and purple striped graph paper journal.

 A more basic streamlined book, these full cloth books take less time, reflecting a lower asking price, but I assure you the build quality is as good as any of my books.

As always you can check them out and buy these books and more at my etsy shop, (hint: look on the left side of this page) and like and share my facebook page.