Escape Key Travel Co. × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Escape Key Travel Co. is Meagan's travel practice, run from the Essex Junction, Vermont area. For ten years she taught high-school history; then came a stay-at-home stretch, and then this. Her About page supplies the primary source. A first trip with her husband took her to Montreal, and a proposal found her at the Cliffs of Moher. The wedding happened in Oahu, a destination wedding before she ever planned one for anyone else, which is why weddings and honeymoons sit so close to the center of her work now.
The name is a keyboard joke that turns out to be a love story, and the monogram chooses the love story. Two thin lines cross in a long X, a large serif E on the left arm and a K on the right. A slender skeleton key stands at twelve o'clock, its bow a heart. From six, a solid keyhole looks back up at it. The artwork arrives in near-white and vanishes on a white page, so before we could study it we set it on deep navy, and that accident of legibility chose our first leather for us.
The mark, as found
Pressed
Blueberry gives the pale monogram the navy ground it was drawn to live on, and Blush leans toward the weddings and honeymoons that fill her calendar. Black takes the gold.
Press ESC
Every keyboard has promised escape since before her students were born, and her name takes that promise at its word. So did we. The ESC keycap grows a shank and a proper bit until it becomes the skeleton key it always claimed to be, with ESCAPE KEY TRAVEL CO. set beneath. Whether the key's fine bit holds at tag scale is something a render can only suggest; the die would need a careful cut there.
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 Escape Key Travel Co. and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.