Giving Family the Leather Bug

[ClayB]

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

[Hoyden]

I just picked up the Celtic book from Tandy and I'm having a blast with it.

I digitized some of the designs to embroider on garment leather.

I ordered the others from Borders for much less than the Tandy price.

[ETW Grumpy]

I picked up the tattoo designs book as well. The designs in it weren't as good as I had hoped they would be, but there were enough to make it worth buying.