Dixie Falk at CAYA Collaborative Care and BGWCHS × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Dixie Falk at CAYA Collaborative Care and BGWCHS keeps a foot in two kinds of rescue. Her working days, as the record we studied has it, run through crisis support at CAYA Collaborative Care, the Kentucky organization that served its neighbors for sixty years as LifeSkills before taking a new name in May 2026. The new footer carries the whole philosophy in four words: "Come as you are." Crisis lines there answer around the clock, by phone and in person, which tells you what kind of house it is.
She also sits on the board of the Bowling Green-Warren County Humane Society, where the motto is "Together, We Save Lives" and nearly twelve thousand animals come through the doors each year, met by volunteers the shelter calls "the heart of everything we do." As far as we can verify, the two organizations meet only in her calendar. That calendar is the thread this study follows.
Pressed
The official CAYA lockup is wide, a long wordmark trailing a four-lobed emblem in which separate petals overlap into one center. A wide mark runs lengthwise here, so it travels the long way down each luggage tag, pressed blind into a trio sampled from the emblem: deep green for the teal that anchors the wordmark, pale sea-blue for the upper aqua petal. The third tag is navy, after the bright blue lobe. Blind deboss throughout; a mark built on welcome carries its weight quietly.
On the toiletry bags the same lockup drops to maker's-mark scale, tucked into the lower-right corner of each front face. The stack pairs a navy bag over deep brown, and the small press stays legible at arm's length in the render.
The open door
"Come as you are" is doormat language in the best sense, so we gave it a doormat. The die draws a front door standing ajar with light fanning across the threshold, and a small cat is already letting itself in, tail up, no appointment made. A town with a shelter this busy understands that welcome runs past our own species. On the journals the design sits generously in the lower-right corner of a warm tan cover and a deep green one, blind debossed, ready for whatever gets written down at the end of a long shift.
Held together
CAYA's emblem works by overlap. Our companion fob borrows that geometry and lets it say the quiet part: four open petals cross at the center, and the space all four share is a solid heart, held in place because every petal shows up. We pressed it blind, centered below the rivet, on a pale warm greige fob and a deep green one. A keyring is a fitting home for it, since people who carry these keys spend their days opening doors for someone else.
Safe and sound
A catchall tray is where the day finally lands, keys and the collar tag that came jingling up the hall. For the golden tan arizona base we drew a dog curled asleep into a near-perfect circle, nose reaching for tail, the ring completed by a small heart of open space where the two almost meet, with SAFE AND SOUND beneath. Nearly twelve thousand arrivals a year at the shelter are hoping for exactly this kind of evening. The press sits clear of the stitched border and the grain stays natural around it; some of the warmth in this render belongs to the leather.
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 Dixie Falk, CAYA Collaborative Care or BGWCHS and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.