Colony Harvest – a leather study of Palmer, Alaska's farming heritage
A September study – Volume I-A.
In May 1935, two hundred three farm families came north to the Matanuska Valley. They cleared fields and raised barrel-roofed barns, and within a few seasons Palmer, Alaska was weighing its cabbages by the hundredweight. Colony Harvest is a small leather exhibition of that story – the modest buildings and the immodest vegetables.
First, the tags. Palmer's oldest joke is scale, so we set a Colony farmstead small on the horizon and ran the furrows out toward it. In the near field, one cabbage has outgrown the barn, with PALMER ALASKA along the bottom edge.
It looks genuinely beautiful.
Next, we pressed the fair itself into an emblem – one cabbage drawn leaf by leaf, ringed by GIANT CABBAGE WEIGH OFF above and SINCE 1941 below. That was the year Palmer first put a $25 prize on the biggest head in the valley, and the weigh-off remains the fair's great ritual today.
On the toiletry bags it sits in the lower corner, honeyed russet over dark espresso – harvest over tilled ground.
Keychains with the cabbage emblem look just awesome too.
And finally, the barn. We drew the barrel-roofed Colony barn head-on from the valley's own 1937 photographs, arched MATANUSKA COLONY over the curve of the roof and set PALMER ALASKA 1935 beneath the ground line.
Looks absolutely gorgeous when stamped onto the leather. It sits generous in the middle of the catchall tray and small on the corner of two journals – one deep brown like the log walls, one pale greige like the sky in the old prints.
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 anything here made real, or anything changed – say hello through our contact page.
P.S.
