Wife's New Purse

[rookie]

I just finished this purse for my wife. Just getting started in leather. I am a hatmaker by trade. So all critiques welcome. Would love to here from others about my work.

[Hilly]

I just finished this purse for my wife. Just getting started in leather. I am a hatmaker by trade. So all critiques welcome. Would love to here from others about my work.

I think you should change your name from "rookie" to "very talented". Great looking purse!

[chocolateducttape]

Looks great to me! Nice work!!

[TomSwede]

Insane!!! New to leather, wow! You sure got some talent and I think you been at least reading up on subject before tooling, right??

Your bag look really , really great and I can't imagine what stuff you could come up with.

Oh since your new to leather I'm guessing your new here so welcome to the forum!

I could give you a few pointers on background if you're interested but posting such nice work for the first time I didn't want to offend you with that just now. I'm thinking you must be really proud of that piece and that is very justified.

Your floral looks good to me but I never ever been even near that so I think if I tried it would not look that good.

Tom

[rookie]

Tom, I new to this stuff so any pointers are apprecciated. Good or bad I listen to it all.

[mikeymoto]

That looks really very nice. Can I presume you applied a resist to the raised portions of the carving, but not down in the depressions? Or did you resist all of the non-background areas and the antique pooled up a bit in the low areas? I think it looks great.

Edited April 18, 2008 by mikeymoto

[rookie]

mickey- I followed the instrucions in the sheridan style book I have on the finish. Neatsfoot first, neatlac 2nd, antique 3rd then finally tan kote.

[TomSwede]

Ok Rookie, if next piece comes out this good you just gotta change that name, lol.

So what I thought of concerns backgrounding only. I hope I'll be able to get my message through, can be a bit awkward when a Swede try's to explain things I think.

To make your work stand out even you can use a checkered edge beveler around main contours that will border against your tooled down background BEFORE working with the smaller pear backgrounder because it looks to me like when you have gone over with the backgrounder you got some of the leather mass underneath the graintop worked up against the design that you wish to make stand out. By edge beveling before, you'll get a harder mass bordering to the design wich helps keeping things in place when backgrounding, I typically also tilt the small pear backgrounder to push mass away from design when getting about one tool width from design thus creating a little a small trail from the tool around the design and this also make the impression a little deeper around the design. I think this makes the design pop out alot more and it sure is timeconsuming.

Best wishes!

Tom

[Spider]

This purse is awesome. I shall not let my wife see it.

[Crystal]

Very nice job. I like the purse and tooling design! Nice stitching.

Crystal