Arrivals – a leather stamping collection for Merced, California
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of original leather stamping studies. Volume II.
A September study.
Arrivals is a small leather collection for Merced, California, where Highway 140 leaves the orchards for Yosemite and the sandhill cranes leave the sky for the wetlands south of town. Everything here is about the moment of getting there. Four designs of our own, each cut as a die and stamped into leather.
First, the luggage tags. This is fruit country, and fruit travels in crates wearing labels worth framing – so we drew our own in that register. A little pyramid of valley fruit rides the left end of the label, and PACKED FRESH does the talking.
On the black tag the label goes down in gold.
The golden tan and the warm red take a blind press. Looks great when stamped onto the leather.
Next, the keychains. Out at the Merced wetlands the burrowing owl keeps the one front door in the county that never needed a key – so we stood it beside its burrow, wrote NO KEY REQUIRED beneath, and put it on the thing that carries all of yours.
Keychains with the little owl look just awesome – one in warm gray, one in chestnut.
Then the passport covers. Every fall the Pacific Flyway lands its regulars in the shallows south of Merced, and somebody ought to stamp their paperwork – so we made the stamp. A crane stands inside a port of entry mark, and the date of arrival reads the only way it ever does: SEPTEMBER.
Pressed blind on navy and on deep green.
And finally, the one we liked the most. A sandhill crane lands so lightly that by the time you look up it is simply standing there, and only the rings on the water tell on it. We drew that half-second after arrival and called it SOFT LANDING.
It looks absolutely gorgeous when stamped onto the leather. On the golden tan tray it sits at the center, since a catchall is where everything in the house comes in to land.
The toiletry bag carries it small in the corner, navy over deep espresso – still water over dark ground.
And the journals press it in pale greige, the gray of the birds themselves, and in warm caramel, the color the reeds turn when the cranes get back.
We made this out of love. Leatherius Woodman is on a mission to create and share artifacts of beauty, craft and love – this study 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 any of these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.
P.S.
