A Safe Place to Be – an Anchorage leather collection

From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of leather stamping studies.

An August study.

An anchorage is a safe place to wait out the tide – Anchorage, Alaska is named for exactly that promise. We pressed the promise, and the town that grew around it, into leather. The collection is called A Safe Place to Be.

First, the promise itself. We set an anchor holding below the waterline, with A SAFE PLACE TO BE arched over it and ANCHORAGE beneath – for the tag on the bag that travels farthest from home.

The anchor die for A Safe Place to Be, an Anchorage leather collection.

On the tags: navy for the cold water of the inlet and pale greige for its silt flats. The black tag carries the design in gold.

Three leather luggage tags stamped with the anchor design from A Safe Place to Be, an Anchorage collection.

Next, the argument the mail won. In 1915 the town voted to call itself Alaska City. The post office kept stamping ANCHORAGE on every envelope, and the postmark outlasted the ballot. So we cut the postmark – a stamp honoring a stamp that got its way.

The 1915 Anchorage postmark die for A Safe Place to Be, an Anchorage leather collection.

The keychains wear it in pale sea-blue, the color of the inlet water. The black fob takes the postmark in gold.

Two leather keychains stamped with the 1915 postmark from A Safe Place to Be, an Anchorage collection.

Then the eastern edge. Downtown runs on its tidy 1915 grid until the Chugach wall stops it – we drew the streets running straight into the mountain, with WHERE THE GRID ENDS written underneath. The toiletry bags stack warm stone gray over weathered-steel brown, a nod to the basalt and weathering steel downtown's new wayfinding is built from.

The mountain and street-grid die for A Safe Place to Be, an Anchorage leather collection.

Two leather toiletry bags stamped with the East Wall design from A Safe Place to Be, an Anchorage collection.

Then the flats. Cook Inlet's tide is among the biggest on the continent; twice a day the water leaves and everything sits on the mud until it comes back. A catchall tray keeps the same schedule with your pockets, so the tray got LOW TIDE – a tide staff standing in the ripples of the drained flat.

The Low Tide mudflat die for A Safe Place to Be, an Anchorage leather collection.

It looks genuinely beautiful on the golden tan.

A golden tan leather catchall tray stamped with the Low Tide design from A Safe Place to Be, an Anchorage collection.

And finally, the one we liked the most. The 1915 plat lettered its streets A through L and skipped J, because I and J were too easy to confuse in handwriting. A letter retired for the sake of legible writing, pressed onto the cover of the thing you write in – in spruce green and warm tan.

The missing J Street die for A Safe Place to Be, an Anchorage leather collection.

Looks absolutely gorgeous when stamped onto the leather.

Two leather journals stamped with the missing J Street design from A Safe Place to Be, an Anchorage collection.

We made this out of love. Leatherius Woodman is on a mission to create and share artifacts of beauty, craft and love – this collection is one of them, and we hope the feeling is mutual. Every image is a render – how we prototype before cutting a die.

If you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.