SojournerLeather

Sweet wristbands; and quite a healthy bit of variety! Nice creativity.

Also, our toolwork is driven pretty deep; I use a heavier maul. So, that makes just dying the untouched surface area much easier; Christine (my wife) just uses sponges and cotton cloth cuts (ratty t-shirts). As long as the applicator won't get in the grooves (unlike like those fluffy wool applicators), and as long as the toolwork is deep and even, it shouldn't take too long to consistently just stain/paint the surface and leave the toolwork.

I just bought that D447. I'll often layer one of the craftool stamps with a hand-made stamp to give it a new look. Here's the last piece I did with that same stamp. Nice coasters, Storm!

abn: No matter how many coats of finish we were putting over them, the dyes would still rub off easily with a moist towel. I was having customers call with the dyes running from getting the covers wet in the rain, etc. ArtS: My wife does the dyes and stains, and any light toolwork is just the natural leather. She stains the non-stamped surface, but is sure to not let any get into the deeper stamp grooves. In all honesty, it's not any more complicated than that; no resist. She's getting pretty good. Myriam: We bought all of our stamps in Argentina. Most of them are recycled railroad spikes. Where we learned to do leatherwork, in Cafayate, Argentina, the technique is very different then American "saddlework." In fact, we just had a story added in the moleskinerie (http://www.moleskinerie.com/2008/04/sojourner-leath.html) about our trip where we got into leather. Thanks all for the support. abn, any thoughts on water damage and eco-flo are extremely welcomed. We were sad to give them up; we're trying to do things as ecologically as possible, which is a pain in the leather business.

I know we've been MIA for a little bit, but we've been busy with schoolwork. We've had some free time the past couple, and we've restocked our etsy store (sojournerleather.etsy.com). Here's some of the latest projects we've finished. We've given up on eco-flo (we were having too much trouble with easy water damage), so we've switched entirely to Fiebings, and so far we've been able to keep a good selection of strong colors going; but I still feel like we sacrificed a tad bit of the eco-flo's vibrancy.

Wow! Twelve replies in less than 24 hours! What we'll be doing first, I think, is calling up a couple print shops in town that may be able to do the printing for us, getting an estimate. But there's an aweful lot of good ideas here I think. I'm gonna scour the web for a bit tonight to try to find that article as well on the old printing type! Thanks all!

So, we've been doing a bunch of custom work at our leathershop (leather book covers mostly, like sketchbooks, journals, and photoalbums), and we've been asked about doing engravings. Now, we've agreed to do small things like initials since we have one of those craftool abc stamp sets, but now we've been asked a couple times about bigger inscriptions, like short quotes. Now, I really don't want to stamp out short quotes. What are some of the things ya'll do when someone wants full names or inscriptions put on their leather? And if you end up stenciling it on with ink, how do you go about doing short quotes with that? Thanks ahead of time. I've been really racking my brain, but I'm not coming up with much on my own here.

Here's some of our recent journals and notebooks.

Thanks for the link, fishguy. It's definitely a start.

These are some great website finds, guys. It also is a good way to begin to understand the differences between the leatherworking methods. You just can't find stamps like those being made in the U.S. (If you have, let us know! We'll make it worth your while!)

The stamps were purchased in Argentina. My wife and I crawled through every major city looking for the small leather shops that sold the stamps. In Argentina, the leatherwork is more geometric than floral, so the leatherworker's pride is her stamps. The majority of the stamps made are hand cut and one of a kind designs. Usually there's symbolic meaning behind the stamps. When we came back to the states, we were aghast to find out that every leather store sells basically the same stuff, whereas in Argentina no two shops sell the same stamps! We were aghast because, had we known that, we would have bought three times as many (we came home with 25 I think).

Does anyone have any clue where I would begin researching how to make those cool italian leather book spines, in particular, how to make the raised ridges that run horizontally across the spine? I've attached a picture of one I found on the net.

Johanna, you're absolutely right about the convenience factor. We're thinking of ways to add at least a pocket. Slayer, true enough about the flap. I guess you'd have to tool the flap up nice instead of the actual cover, or both if you'd really want to soupe it up. In fact, a flap technically might add a bit more surface area to play around with. Abn, I like the way it looks too. In fact, I was really happy with the way it turned out, so I think we're definitely keeping this one as one design, and then maybe have a flap design to choose between. Knight, unfortunately, we don't have a stitcher. But, to be frank, we're not really planning on getting one! We kinda prefer the covers right now being all handmade. So, that being the case, thanks a ton for the offer, but a zipper, at least for now, is almost certainly not possible. Thanks, though, for considering digging into the files for us . Thanks all for taking a look at it.

Christine and I are working on a few new designs of bible covers for custom orders. This is our first prototype that we made this week as a display model for a show this week. Any comments on the design? We're trying to design something that would fit over study bibles (so rather large surface area for a cover). The difference between ours and your traditional cover is that, since ours aren't factory made (like these), we don't have zippers that enclose the entire book; so ours don't protect that big book as well. One idea we had was to add a bit of a leather flap and a cord to wrap around like some of the fashionable journals around today (like these ones). Any thoughts on designs for a book like this would be great.

Very cool lacework going up the back.

Johanna wrote: That would be incredible. We're rather new to the web, so we'd especially appreciate it. Johanna wrote: I'll be sure to be in contact with you regarding the tutorial once I've got it worked out. Thanks Johanna!

Thanks for the support, all. In the next couple weeks, we're planning on putting out a nice little tutorial that describes exactly what we do. We've got a couple shows coming up, so, we're working hard now at building up our inventory; so wish us luck!

I recently joined leatherworker.net's forums, and there was a little interest in seeing some more Argentine leatherwork. So, I'm going to post a couple more pics of my work, and then I thought it may be a treat to see some pics of the work of the leathermaster that taught us, Enrique Valdez. The books are mine, the purses are Enrique's. Most of my pics can be found on our business' website at www.sojournerleather.com. There's more pics from my first thread here (http://www.leatherworker.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=2317). More of Valdez' work will be available once I've designed a nice site for him. (We're thinking of importing some of his work here to give him a little more business.)

As soon as I have the time, I'll definitely do a nice overview of what we were taught in Argentina. I was considering doing a couple articles to post at our www.sojournerleather.com website as well as anywhere else. If possible, I'd like to contribute an article on it to anyone that has a leather website and posts articles and tutorials. Is there much interest in that, you think?

Thanks all for such a warm welcome. Alex: 1. There's two ways to go about this: You can either a) head to the really expensive "tourism" focused gift shops, but you're looking at paying much more (although the quality's guaranteed). We didn't check these out so much because we were traveling on the budget, but it should be fairly easy to find them with a good B.A. travel guide. The second option, is to head to the fairs. We were disappointed in the most famous street fair in B.A., the Sunday Plaza Domingo fair in San Telmo, but we stumbled on a real nice and big fair in Recoleta where we found a fair amount of leather work, including some beautiful cincelado. If you're heading to Cordoba, the big fair in the antique district had some beautiful leatherwork. Our teacher, Enrique Valdez, lives with his family in Cafayate (Tucuman province) and has his shop in the little market in the square. His work was the most impressive we saw (although he's talking about moving south to Ushuaia). 2. Most industries cluster their small businesses, so if you find one leather store, you'll find four or five right next to them. The best cluster in Buenos Aires we found was near the Buedo stop on the E subte line. I can't quite remember the details, but the cluster is two blocks walk from the stop, and you have to walk under an overpass. We bought several stamps there for the most reasonable prices in all of Argentina, and the selection was nice and fat. The neighborhood is not real touristy, so don't go at night (the shops'll most likely be closed). That should keep you busy researching for a bit . If you have any questions at all about any of this, shoot me an email or start a new thread, and we can get into the details. Argentina is an amazing place for crafts in general: not only is the leather top notch, but they have precious stones galore, as well as tin and jeweling metals. You can find a lot of beautiful art work to keep a craftsman busy in between mates. And you can't beat the prices for locally made tools. An average hand carved one-of-a-kind leather stamp cost about $3 US dollars. We came home with heavy luggage.

Hello, all. My wife and I are new here, and we thought we'd introduce ourselves a bit. Our names are Luke and Christine Thompson, and we run a small leather artisan group, Sojourner Leatherwork (www.sojournerleather.com). We learned our craft in Argentina, not the U.S., so our method is slightly different than American saddlework. Our teacher called his method 'cincelado del sur', a leather stamping method of gaucho/Andean origin. So, we learned our leatherwork in Argentina, and now we do leatherwork on the side here in the states. Our small business works mostly on book covers, like sketchbooks, journals, diaries, photo albums, wedding books, etc. We're interested, though, in expanding our skills into U.S. leatherwork, so I'm sure we'll be bouncing around this forum quite a bit picking up what we can! I uploaded a couple photos of our work. Nice to meet you all and see so much gorgeous work. Stop by our website and say hi.