Hello Ivory Rose × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Hello Ivory Rose is Janene Crossley's blog, and it reads the way a good friend talks. She writes from Dallas about her college sweetheart and their four children, and about the rooms she keeps reworking until her home earns the words she once gave it, "a sanctuary that sparks joy." Her about page also confesses that "Diet Coke and chocolate are my jam," which told us most of what we needed to know about the register of the place.
What kept pulling us back was the masthead. A wide watercolor spray of blush and rose flowers over thin, airy capitals, with a tiny hand-drawn heart flowing into the lowercase signature "janene." A mark like that already behaves like an object, and we wanted to feel it in leather.
The mark, as found
Pressed
Her travel writing made the canvas an easy call: luggage tags, cut lengthwise so the wide masthead can run the tag's full length. The leathers come out of the mark. Blush and parisian blossom carry the pale and the deeper pink of her watercolor flowers. A third tag in gray sand holds the warm white the whole site breathes. Every press is blind, tone on tone. The one thing we watched with some concern is the tiny signature; at tag scale it rides the limit of what a press can hold, so the flowers and the capitals do the carrying.
The rose, at full bloom
The brand is named for a flower that the masthead only ever shows in watercolor. We wanted to see the ivory rose carved. One garden rose at full bloom, drawn in the dense linework of an old botanical engraving, its stem curling closed into the small heart Janene tucks into her signature. That heart is our favorite detail of her mark, and it survives the translation.
At full size the rose fills the catchall tray in golden tan arizona leather, a dish for the small ritual of coming home and emptying your pockets.
Shrunk to fob scale, it becomes a keychain. One in blush, one in lilac – the cool dusty note of the stems and foliage in her mark.
A hello in the corner
Some placements want a whisper. Toiletry bags and journals take a corner maker's mark, so we restacked the masthead's thin capitals into a small square block, HELLO over IVORY over ROSE, letterspaced until the three lines square up, and signed it underneath with that same one-stroke heart. The masthead, folded down to the size of a wax seal.
The toiletry bags wear it low in the corner, a country gray bag stacked on dark espresso – the gray of her foliage over the near-black of her lettering, pressed without foil so the mark reads as pure shadow.
The journals take the same corner press, a duo in parisian blossom and country gray. For a writer whose site is one long argument that family memories deserve beautiful keeping, a blank book with her own hello in the corner felt like the right place to end.
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 Hello Ivory Rose and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.