Havamal

Welcome aboard Don. Look forward to seeing some of your work.

That is too cool! love the colour scheme and the workmanship is top notch!

Willem, I love the wilderness and open spaces, I grew up on a small island off the coast of British Columbia, Canada and have spent a great deal of time traveling in past years. I have been to almost every state in the US, all of the Canadian provinces, even the Arctic Circle. My next step is to get off this continent! I have an artist friend that travel to Africa almost every year and do volunteer wildlife conservation projects and they have invited my wife & I to go with them next time. However, my wife wants to go to Scotland as well... I guess we will see which trip prevails!! Really look forward to seeing some of your work!

Welcome aboard! Look forward to seeing some of your work. Thanks for posting the pics from your neck of the woods. I have always wanted to travel there, maybe someday I'll make it

Nice work! Thanks for posting.

Welcome aboard, from the North West!

Those are realy nice Bill, they would be a hot item anywhere! Good luck with the saddle bags!

Thanks again for the support everyone! I think my next step will be to work on some smaller projects like coasters or bookmarks to work on getting better at the tooling.

Thanks for the kind words Cheryl. Your right, I have been doing a lot of reading here... the amount of knowledge available here is phenomenal! I spent a lot of time after I did the tooling saying as I read info on here. There are a lot of things that I discovered, after I did the work, that I should have done or did incorrectly. (casing the leather properly being one of the big ones ) I can not say enough about the info available here or the people on this forum!

Thanks again everybody... your comments have done wonders for my confidence in taking this on.

Welcome! I'm originally from B.C. but living in Washington currently.

Thanks for the support everyone. Benlilly ~ not posssible, I called Dion Warwick and she says that yours is a counterfeit

Welcome Half Goat! I have seen your stuff online at etsy and actually stumbled on your blog a while back. Having a Norwegian ancestry your work struck a cord. Look forward to seeing more!

Welcome aboard! I just started my self, and was thinking of using a briefcase that I have for all my stuff. Right now I work at an old desk in the corner of my spare bedroom... The desk is small, but seems to be working ok for now, but I can foresee needing a bigger area!

Thanks for the kind words everyone. I do love working with leather, so I do believe I will continue on and develope this addiction. I work a high stress job and I found that doing this is really therapeutic compared to other things I have tried. As far as the cost of leatherwork, no need to save pennies, I bought a powerball ticket for tonights drawing of $500,000,000. I figure that would keep me in hide for a while

I decided to just use one of those kit things from TLF to see if I had any kind of aptitude for tooling leather. I went with the check book cover... simply because it didn't look too difficult, but yet not as simple as some of the others... or it might have had something to do with it sitting in front of me when I decided to jump in with both feet... either way, here it is. Let me know if I should continue down this path of leather addiction or if I should get into a 12 step program before it is too late... One thing I noticed right off... when you take a picture of the finished work the camera sure brings out the imperfections! You can see where I was heavy handed and where I was too light with the mallet!

Wonderfull work! impressive...

Welcome to the forum by the way! I'm fairly new myself, the amount of knowledge on this site is phenomenal and the people are always willing to help! Look forward to seeing more!

Realy like the links... they realy give the piece that extra touch with out going overboard.

Thanks for the Welcome cbuild!

I do a lot of work with Penske and they typically have 24ft liftgated box trucks available. They occationally have 36ft liftgated trailers as well. You might check with them, I get good rates from them due to the amount of business I do, I'm not sure how the regular rates are. They have facilities in Las Vegas & Flagstaff but you might also look at the rate of renting one for a round trip out of the Riverside office.

Welcome to the forum and to your new addiction! My son likes the key chain, he also plays Skyrim a lot so he recognized it instantly!

Ingenious use of the rounder! It came out awesome.

Welcome aboard! Look forward to some pics