ClayB

If you go to leatherworker.net website, not the forum at http://www.leatherworker.net and click on suppliers, it will give you links or contact info for a lot of leathercraft suppliers. If anyone has more info they would like added to the list, the is a link to do that on the bottom of the page. Clay

I have been using the American Value brand for a while now and I really like it. It tools and forms really well. I was told it is tanned for Hidecrafter by Herman Oak and is just a lower grade but I haven't had any problems at all with it. Clay

Hey Freak, That's really nice! I think it's the best carving you have done yet, at least that I have seen. You've got good shading and it looks like you've got good depth. I think it really helps when your design is something that you really like. I know what you mean about coloring too. When I carve a project that turns out pretty good, it's always scary to think about messing it up with color, but it's something you have to do if you want to get good at it. Clay

I was also told both classes were due to personel reasons. Bob has cancelled all his classes and shows until he settles his father's affairs. Jeff had some changes in his personal situation which mean he wont be traveling as much. I also was told Rene Berend's wont be attending the show due to personal reasons and that Paul Burnett and Bill Gomer have health concerns but hopefully will be doing well enough to attend. I don't think any of these people teach classes at these shows for the money. They all have a passion for leatherwork and are excited about passing on what they know and helping others improve thier skills. I think all of these guys would be at the show if it is at all possible. There are still a lot of really talented teachers that are going to be there so hopefully everyone that wants to take some classes will find some of interest. Clay

Major, The letters were from an alphabet sheet she bought at the Dollar Store. The letters are printed on cork and she just glued them on. Freak, You are funny as always. I have always asked her and the kids for advice on my projects. Romey, You are gonna have to take a number and wait your turn. She took the notebooks to work with her and came home with an order for 5 of them!! Again, thanks everyone for you kind comments and encouragement. Clay

Kate, When I rebuilt our basement a few years ago, I built a studio for my wife to do her crafts in. She let me come out of the closet I had my leather stuff in and use a corner of her room. It wasn't long before she had her room filled up, and I had to move out to the last remaining corner of the basement. Now my corner is about as full as it can get. There are a lot of things in our crafts that overlap and we can share and it's fun to be able to work together. Patrice, As someone mentioned, the cuttlebug can be found in a lot of craft stores here in the states and you should be able to find it online. When we tried to use a green leaf, it squished all the juice out of it and kind of made a mess. The dried one worked a lot better. We had some dry leaves laying around that I picked up several years ago because I thought they looked cool. Never knew what we were going to do with them. We have dried leaves and flowers in between pages of a book. Noel, I am sure there are lots of your scrapbooking things you can make use of with leather too. I have shared all your comments with Stacy (my wife). Thanks all of you for you encouragement. Clay

I think the simply answer would be that matting tools cover more area quickly. They are also supposed to leave less tracks, making it easier to cover bigger areas smoothly. There are times when I will start with a background tool around the edge of a design, then switch to a matting tool as you get farther away from the design. This is especially useful if your pattern doesn't have a border. With the matting tools, you can just fade out to nothing. Hope this helps a little. Clay

I'd be interested in hearing how others feel about this, but I always figured when you could see the impressions on the backside, it meant your moisture was good and you were getting really good depth. Kind of like burnish, but on the backside. I have never considered it a bad thing. And Freak, nice job! Clay

I told how she did this in a post to the Leather Conversation section called Leaf Leather. We had seen some purses with leaves on them and were trying to figure out how to do something similar. There were a few ideas tossed around and then both Kate and my wife tried things with similar results. I'll pass on everyones comments to my wife, until I can get her to join the forum herself. Clay

My wife used some of her scrapbooking toys to put leaf impressions and other designs today and made the pieces into a couple of small notebooks. This was her first experience with making things out of leather and I thought she did a great job of it. I helped with some of the coloring. I think there will be more to come from her.

Congratulations Dan. You done good!!!!

We tried it too and got pretty good results. We used a little crank through embossing and die cutting press my wife has for scrapbooking called a Cuttlebug. When we tried a fresh green leaf, it didn't work real well. But when we tried it with a dried leaf, it worked pretty good. My wife liked it so much she wanted to make something out of it, so it ended up being a small notebook. Then she decided to try some of her other scrapbooking toys on leather. She ran a piece of leather through the embossing machine with an embossing plate and came up with a really nice design on the leather. She's going to make another little book out of that one. It looks pretty neat with highlighter on it. It's been fun to play with something competely different than what I normally do. Clay

I was just informed that Robert Beard will NOT be teaching a class at the show in Fort Worth this fall. That's really too bad for those that were planning on taking his class. Bob is a great guy and a lot of fun to get to know. Clay

Steve, I dont think Jeff is a member here on the forum. The picture of the stamp in his basketweave tutorial is one made by his good friend Bob Beard. http://robertbeardtools.com Bob's tools are all hand made, kind of pricey, and take about 6 months or more to recieve, but most people that have any of them are really happy with them. Jeff Mosby makes laser engraved maker stamps and some other neat tools for leatherwork as well as does a lot of custom guitar inlay work and guitar straps. Clay

Was he talking Feibing's dyes, or Tandy? All the Fiebings dyes I ever used were alcohol based. Tandy's new eco ones are water based. I don't see how you could pour spirit based dye in a new bottle and make it water based. Maybe some of the acrylic finishes could just be re-labeled but I kinda doubt CA would fall for that. There are also a whole bunch of new colors available that they didn't have before. Not sure who is trying to dupe who, but I am a little skeptical.

I'm with Peter here. I still use the cheap Tandy swivel knives but with good blades in them. I have one with a Henley blade designed by Peter Main for thin leather, a couple with Bob Beard sharp angle detail blades in them, and a couple with regular Tandy blades in them yet. I bought a thin barrel Barry King knife a couple years ago and it just doesn't fit me well. I think I am on the list for one of Bob Beard's knives when he gets some made. I am not sure if all the ball bearings make a tremendous amount of difference in your carving, but they sure are fun to play with when the yoke will spin forever.

Regis, I had thought of the same thing and I think my wife is going to try that when she gets home tonight. She has several roller press type things, one is a pasta machine, that might do that. We are going to try setting a leaf on cased leather and rolling it through the machine to see what happens. I do have the ringer off an old washing machine laying around somewhere but I think the rollers are in pretty bad shape. I am going to have to watch the auction sale bills and see if I can pick up a better one somewhere. I have heard they work really well for using the plastic Craftaid templates too. I don't used one of those in a long time, but just in case. Peter, More good ideas. I had also thought of something like the tap offs saddle makers use. Maybe if you can get a leaf imprint in a piece of saddle skirting, you could use that on the same order as the plaster. Another thing my wife thought of was just rubber stamping the leaf onto the leather with ink, then adding heat activated embossing powder to get the raised impression. Lots of ideas to try, one of them will surely work. When we get around to trying them, I'll try and post pictures of the results. Clay

There are lot of ways to wet (case) your leather. The amount of moisture can depend on the quality of leather. I have found that some of the leather in Tandy kits dries out really quickly and you have to add more often than leather like Herman Oak. There are a couple threads on the form about casing you might want to read through. Just do a search for casing. http://www.leatherworker.net/forum/index.p...=1057&hl=casing http://www.leatherworker.net/forum/index.p...=1357&hl=casing

When I was trying to figure out how it was done, I thought of that. Using some sort of a roller over a leaf to make an impression. The leaves on the purse are actually slightly raised. I am going to have to play around with some ideas and see what happens, if I ever get my other projects finished. Seems like somebody had something similar to this in Sheridan in the last couple years too. I'll have to go back through pictures and see. Clay

While in SD last weekend, we were in a shop that had some really interesting leather purses. I have never seen anything like the patterns on this stuff before but I would love to be able to do it. My wife loves leaves and HAD to have one of these, so she got one of the smallest ones they had. The purse she wanted was several hundred dollars. There was a tag on the purse, so I googled the guys name and came up with a website. I cant get it to work very good, but that might be my computer. www.clwhiting.com If you can get the site to work and go to about the artist, it tells how he engraves individual leaf stamps to make the impressions in the leather. It says he has over 5000 stamps to make different patterns. Then whole hides are stamped with designs and then the hide is cut to make parts for different purses. I wonder if he would be interested in selling some of those stamps?? I found a couple other sites that seem to work better and have lots of pictures of his work. http://austinpresence.com/collection/leath...leafleather.htm http://www.viviansartforliving.com/artist....&name=&start=13

Hi Vera, I have looked at your website and the pictures you are posting here and your work is really nice. You do such a variety of things and they all look great. The pictures of buildings and scenery really interest me and I keep going back to look at them. When it comes to painting leather, there are a couple different ways to do it. You can use dyes which penetrate the leather and are usually alcohol based or you can use acrylic paints which stay mostly on top of the leather. Both have thier advantages and disadvantages. There has been some discussion in the "Dyes and Finishes" section of the forum. You might want to browse through that area, and then if you have more questions, just ask. Welcome to the forum. We are glad to have you and hope you continue to post pictures of your work. Clay

A couple years ago at the IFOLG show in Denver, Charley Crow showed a mexican style saddle that he had made. Here is a picture of it. Charley is a really nice guy and I bet he would be willing to answer any questions you had if he could. I would just have to try and find his email address somewhere. I guess if I do, I should invite him here.

Last weekend my wife and I made a trip to the Black Hills in SD, one of our favorite places to visit. (if anyone hasn't been there, I took a couple...... ok, a couple hundred......... pictures. While we were there we stopped in at the new Tandy store in Rapid City. It was the last day of the grand opening and the place was packed with people. I was hoping to get some time to talk to Clay Miller, the manager, but he was really busy with all the customers in there so we spent some time browsing around. I got to looking at the pattern books since there are some fairly new ones out. I thought I would be interested in the Great Book of Floral Patterns. There are a lot of nice patterns in there. But the one that surprised me was the Great Book of Tattoo Designs. This book has over 500 patterns from fairies and dragons to green men, to some neat wildlife patterns. Some of the wildlife patterns were interesting and I had a few ideas I would like to try with some of them so that one came home with us. My wife has never been interested in working with leather, but she is into lots of other crafts like rubber stamping, scrapbooking, polymer clay etc. All the things that seem to be really popular on the craft shows on DIY and HGTV. While I was looking at pattern books, I found a couple other books I hadn't seen before so I picked them up and was looking through them. I realized right away that these books contained projects my wife might be interested in. These projects are not what I consider "real" leatherwork, which in my mind means detailed carving and consturction. These books have simple projects that my wife would call "artsy". The first book is called Leather Crafting in an Afternoon by Mickey Baskett but has projects done by several artists. The projects include things like bookmarks, covered boxes, pillows, lampshades, picture frames, pot holders, oven mitts, jewelry and more. There is some basic carving and stamping on some, but others are decorated with rubber stamps, beads, wood burning tools etc. Lots of fairly easy projects for beginners or people that do other types of crafts that might be interested in trying some leather projects. The other book is called Making Leather Purses and Totes by Lisa Galvin. Projects in this book are, you probably guessed it, purses and totes. These projects are decorated with some of the same techniques as the projects in the other book and all look fairly uncomplicated to do. The only problem that I could find with either of these books is that they both mention the IILG as the place to go on the web if you are interested in finding out more about leatherwork. We'll have to work on changing that misconception ) I am hoping that sometime in the near future I will be able to post some pictures of leather projects done by my wife with the ideas from these books. Clay

I have to confess, it isnt the dog licking the doughnuts, it's me. : Hey, I can't help myself, I really like those little sprinkly things they put on the tops. I was feeding the licked on ones to my dog, but everyone here was complaining that we were running out of doughnuts. It reminds me of the story of the politician that was campaigning at the nursing home. He was sitting on a chair in an old guys room talking to him and starting eating these peanuts in a bowl. Before long, the bowl was empty and he apologized to the old man for eating all his peanuts. The old guy said "oh that's ok, since I lost my teeth, all I can do is suck the chocolate off them anyway". Welcome to this forum. Everyone here is really friendly, even Johanna. The conversation is good, everyone is willing to help, and the pictures are great. But, you might want to bring your own snacks.

I hope you can get Billy's galleries moved here somewhere. It was always so much fun to see what his next masterpiece was. I miss seeing them, and talking to him about how he was doing things. : Sure would be fun if he would get well enough to spend a little time here. I think the link to the "technique" shows an earlier version of how Billy did things, before he starting using the transfer medium. Do you know if the DVD is still going to be available somewhere? And for that matter, do you know if Frank ever finished the book he was doing on the technique (you still here Frank?) I am looking forward to seeing the pics again once you get them up, and continue to send good thoughts and wishes Billy's way. Clay