ClayB

Hi Dave, For your first embossing project, I think you did great! One of the most frustrating things about trying to write these lessons is that several of the products Jan has been using in his leather work are being changed or discontinued. In one of the classes I taught, I picked up a can of Tandy's new version of rubber cement to mix putty with. I found out that the new formulation Tandy is selling took forever to dry when mixed with putty. Jan and I both had heard that a different brand of rubber cement (Petronio's) was supposed to be great stuff. Several saddle makers and boot makers had been using it and were very happy with it. We made the mistake of suggesting it as a product to use in our first lessons before we had actually tried it. If that is what you used on your project, we owe you an apology. We tried using it when we did a later lesson and found that while it does dry very quickly on the surface, when mixed with leather dust and used as putty, it also didn't set up well. After waiting several hours for it to dry enough to work on, we had to scrape it off the back of our project and start over. The only rubber cement we have found to work right so far is Barge Brand rubber cement. Other brands "might" work if the putty is put on in very thin layers, say 1/8th in thick and letting them dry, but that would drastically increase the time it takes to finish a project like this. Getting the putty part of your project to blend in with the leather takes some practice. It takes a sharp scalpel blade to cut into the putty. It works best to kind of roll your knife blade from the leather into the putty, if that makes sense. If you drag the blade from the leather into the putty, or from the putty onto the leather, it can drag out portions of the putty. Please don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions. By knowing if there are things we haven't covered well enough in the lessons, we can try to make the future lessons better. We really appreciate your support of our project and hope that they make learning these techniques a bit easier.

I'll second what Jerry says, check out Paul Burnett's website. Sign up for his newsletter and read the past editions. There's a lot of great info in his free lessons, and even more in the ones he has for sale. Then just keep practicing and have fun with it!

My thoughts exactly!

I really like those spur straps too!

There is a book that I got at Tandy a couple years ago called Leather Crafting in an Afternoon written by Mickey Baskett. The book cover quite a few "unconventional" ways to decorate leather. Rubber stamps and paint are a couple things that are used in the projects in the book. My wife does rubber stamping and scrap booking and a lot of the tools and supplies she uses for her craft can also be used on leather. You are limited only by your imagination. My advice would be if you think it might look good on leather, give it a try. You might want to practice on some scrap first, but you never know what you might come up with. Welcome to Leatherworker.net. I hope you have a lot of fun trying new things and don't forget to share some picture of what you come up with.

I'm always happy to help if I can. If you have any questions on embossing leather like this, I will do my best to answer them. Robb Barr did a series of video lessons on extreme embossing on many different subjects. You can get them through Hidecrafter.

I do quite a bit of what I call 3-D embossing. It sounded a lot like what you are describing until you said the main tool used is the modeling tool. You can go to my website and see if what I do is what you are wanting to learn. If it is, there are a few tutorials on the site that will help you get started. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to try and answer them. I am also working on a series of lessons with Jan Schoonover teaching what he calls "extreme" embossing. We've got 3 lessons finished so far and they are also available off of my website.

I didn't have the chance to meet Drac in person either. I can't even remember if I ever corresponded with him personally on the forum. But through his posts, I felt like I knew him a little, and I think I would have liked him if we'd have had the chance to meet. Looking back, it seems like he did reach out to all of us here a while back, and I am saddened that I didn't take a couple minutes out of my life to say "hey freind, I'm thinking about you". Maybe it wouldn't have made any difference, but then again, maybe it could have. We've lost a member of our family here on LW and he will be missed. I pray that Drac is in a better place now and that he has found the peace he was searching for.

One of Al's later books, Pictorial Carving Finesse gives very detailed instruction on carving all kinds of trees as well as most other scenery elements. It is the companion book to Figure Carving Finesse which goes into detail on carving numerous animals and also people. Anyone interested in figure carving really ought to have both of these books.

When I used the rolling pin to do this, I put an acrylic block over the leaf on the leather before rolling the rolling pin over it. That way the leaf stayed where I put it on the leather. One other thing. If you use green leaves through a roller press that applies a lot of pressure, you risk squeezing the juice out of the leaf and onto the leather making a sticky mess. That happened to us when we tried using a small juniper tree branch. We had best results using dried leaves.