Eight Miles Home – a Hope Valley, Rhode Island leather collection

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

An August study.

Eight Miles Home is a small leather collection made for Hope Valley, Rhode Island – luggage tags, journals and so on, each pressed with a piece of the village. The name is the old branch railroad's arithmetic: eight miles of track from Wood River Junction up to Depot Square, and every one of them pointed home.

First, the line itself. We laid the branch railroad down the length of a luggage tag – eight mileposts between the junction switch and the depot, with EIGHT MILES HOME riding above the rails.

It looks genuinely beautiful.

The black-and-white Eight Miles Home railroad die for the Hope Valley, Rhode Island leather collection.

Three leather luggage tags stamped with the Eight Miles Home branch-line design from Hope Valley, Rhode Island.

Next, we struck a trade token – GOOD FOR ONE PENNY IN TRADE around a single twist-wrapped candy – and put it where a token belongs, on the keychain in your pocket. The black fob carries the token in gold; the warm tan one takes it blind, copper on copper.

The black-and-white penny trade-token die from the Eight Miles Home leather collection of Hope Valley, Rhode Island.

Black and caramel leather keychains stamped with a penny token from the Eight Miles Home collection of Hope Valley, Rhode Island.

The catchall tray takes the same token at full size. A tray is where pockets empty at the end of the day, so the penny lands here.

An arizona leather catchall tray stamped with the penny token from Eight Miles Home in Hope Valley, Rhode Island.

Then the two forces that built the valley, stacked into one small stamp – a horseshoe over HORSE POWER, a waterwheel under WATER POWER. It sits low in the corner of the toiletry bags, caramel over chestnut like a tack-room shelf.

The Horse Power and Water Power die from the Eight Miles Home leather collection of Hope Valley, Rhode Island.

Two leather toiletry bags stamped with Horse Power and Water Power for Eight Miles Home in Hope Valley, Rhode Island.

And finally, the one we liked the most. A compositor's stick holds one line of movable type, ten letters reading HOPE VALLEY, beneath the words SET IN – printing presses were once built beside this river, and type gets set the way stories do. The journal leaves the next line to you.

Looks absolutely gorgeous when stamped onto the leather – ink navy for one cover, pale greige for the paper of the other.

The Set In Hope Valley movable-type die from the Eight Miles Home leather collection in Rhode Island.

Blueberry and gray-sand leather journals stamped Set In Hope Valley for the Eight Miles Home collection in Rhode Island.

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 these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.