Children's Advocacy Center of Suffolk County × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
The Children’s Advocacy Center of Suffolk County has kept one promise since 1995: a child who has been hurt should have to tell the story once, in one place, to people prepared to act on it. It is the county’s only nonprofit gathering every discipline such a child might need under a single roof, around 1,500 referrals a year, in service of what its mission calls “safety, healing and justice for child victims and their families.”
In 2004 the Center founded SEEN, Support to End Exploitation Now, one of the country’s first multidisciplinary teams for trafficked children. Its founding insight was simple and overdue: a commercially exploited young person is a victim of child abuse and deserves to be met as one. SEEN has supported more than 1,800 high-risk and exploited youth since, and its model has traveled well beyond Boston.
The mark, as found
A loose purple line drawing of a child with arms flung wide and curving upward, an oval head floating free above a triangular body, beside the name in clean white type. It looks drawn by hand in one glad motion, which is exactly the register this work deserves. We kept it as it is.
Pressed
The full lockup, blind debossed at maker’s-mark scale in the lower right corner of a two-bag toiletry set, warm country gray above deep dark espresso. There is no foil here; the mark sits in the leather as quiet shadow relief, which suits an organization whose best work is steady and rarely on display.
Seven stars
The companion design plots the Center’s figure as a constellation – seven solid stars joined by thin chart lines, out of which the open-armed child emerges. We hesitated at first over whether any figure belonged on gifts from this world, and their own settled it: it is open-armed and glad. A constellation also happens to be an honest picture of the work itself. Every point of light is real on its own; the figure appears only when someone takes the trouble to draw the connections between them.
On the luggage tags the constellation runs lengthwise, trailing small stars toward either end. Dusty lavender, close kin to the purple of their mark, sits beside warm country gray. The black tag carries the stars in gold foil – a night sky in miniature.
The same sky, smaller
For the smaller goods the constellation gathers into a roundel, ringed by a thin circle with a few small stars resting in the field.
The keychains press it blind into dusty lavender and pale sea-blue, a pairing with something of early harbor light about it – the Center’s people spend their days in Boston and its harbor-edge neighbors.
The catchall tray comes in golden tan arizona, the one leather this piece wears, the roundel pressed generously into its base. A place for keys and a lanyard to land at the end of a long day.
The journals pair dusty lavender with deep forest green, the roundel sitting as a corner mark on each wrap cover. People in this line of work carry other people’s stories in their notes; a cover that keeps its own counsel felt right.
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're the Children’s Advocacy Center of Suffolk County and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.