IF:Gathering × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
IF:Gathering began in 2014 with a question that refused to sit still: “If God is real… then what?” Women gathered to answer it in company, and the answering has since reached more than a million women in 179 countries. The ministry describes its work as women gathering to know God and make Him known, and its ten-year report calls the whole enterprise a “giant group project.” We liked that line the moment we read it. It trades spectacle for the truer picture: coffee dates and dinners that run long.
The stated rhythm is “Gather. Equip. Unleash.” – large rooms in Dallas, then tools carried home to a kitchen table somewhere far away. This study presses that motion into leather.
The mark, as found
One long serif line, all capitals, the colon doing quiet work after the IF. On the cover of the official ten-year report it sits in warm cream on a field of deepest blue-green, tracked wide and patient. A wordmark this horizontal tells a stamper exactly what it wants: room to run.
Pressed
We gave the wordmark the long axis of a luggage tag and cut the family in deep forest green and pale warm greige – the report cover's dark field and its cream type, translated into hide. A black tag joins them and carries the gold, the closest a press comes to that luminous light-on-dark treatment.
A table, set for six
IF:Table runs on six words: “Two hours. Four questions. Six women.” That is a geometry as much as a format, so we drew it from above – six places around one table, a loaf at the center, the format's own words circling the rim.
It is pressed blind into the golden tan of our arizona catchall tray, the burnished ochre of the report's fine rule made three-dimensional. A tray is where the day ends and the small things land. We like the thought of keys and a ring settling onto a table that stays set.
The question, kept close
A journal is the most natural object in this whole study, since note-taking and Scripture already belong to IF's daily world. Our bookplate sets the founding question in the corner of the cover: IF GOD IS REAL above, THEN WHAT large beneath it with its question mark standing full height, the way it must have looked the first time it was written down. Whoever opens the notebook is handed the question. The pages that follow are hers.
The duo renders in deep forest green and pale warm greige, blind debossed, generous in the lower corner.
The door, open
The people we kept imagining while we worked are the hosts – the women who open a home so six others can get past small talk. The third design is a badge of a front door standing ajar, light spilling through the gap onto the mat, RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE arced beneath. On a keychain it rides beside the keys that open that door. The black fob carries the gold pass; its companion renders in golden tan arizona, pressed blind.
We hesitated over the toiletry bag – a discipleship ministry is no travel outfit – but the travel is real, staff and speakers moving between Dallas and everywhere the stream reaches. So the same badge sits at maker's-mark scale in the corner of a navy bag stacked over deep espresso brown, debossed without any foil.
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 IF:Gathering and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.