Karen C. Klemens × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Karen C. Klemens is a meditator from Arizona who volunteers at Bonnevaux, the international home of the World Community for Christian Meditation. She first arrived in spring 2023 with the first cohort of the WCCM Academy, about thirty students from thirteen countries, and she kept coming back – as a retreatant, then as a helper at the Abbey and the guest house. When she describes the place she reaches for its trees and fields, its flowers and sky, and for the rhythm of the days there: prayer and work, together and alone. She calls the whole experience “a true gift.”
Public records hold a quieter, earlier chapter. For nearly four decades she was a registered securities professional, a Certified Financial Planner with a spotless record, and that registration ended in 2024. She has never called this retirement in anything we read, so we simply note that the two chapters sit side by side, and that this study is drawn entirely from the second.
The name, as found
Karen's public mark, for now, is simply her name. The record that knows it best spells it KAREN C. KLEMENS, and we set it in plain type exactly so, letter for letter. The period after her middle initial is the only ornament the name carries.
The mark this study proposes
Then we drew her one. It is a circular seal in the spirit of an old bookplate. Her full name curves around the upper ring, and a broad old tree stands at the center on open ground; a small sun rises behind the crown, and leaves garland the lower arc. Everything in it comes from her own account of Bonnevaux – the ancient character of the place, the fields and the light. Proposing a personal mark for a stranger is a presumption, and we hold it lightly; she may read the tree entirely differently, and the offer to change any of it stands.
Pressed
The seal travels as a family of three luggage tags, each blind debossed, tone on tone. Two of them take the landscape she describes – forest green for the trees and fields, gray sand for pale old stone. The third is arizona, a golden tan, for the state she flies home to.
Together and alone
The second design begins with the sentence Karen uses for the rhythm of volunteer life: prayer and work, together and alone. Thirteen walked paths, one for each country in that first Academy cohort, enter a round field from its rim and curve gently inward until they gather at a small still center. Her phrase sits beneath them in small capitals. The die is shown here as an art plate, the way our designer will receive it.
On the toiletry bags the medallion becomes a small maker's mark, pressed blind into the lower right corner of a country gray bag stacked on dark espresso – warm stone above deep shadow, the register of an old building.
The keychains are the carried version, the piece that goes home in a pocket when a volunteer season ends. One fob is pale sea-blue, one is forest green; sky over field, on a brass ring.
The catchall tray is for the threshold between the day and the sitting. The few small things a person sets down before silence land here, on golden arizona leather, the thirteen paths waiting at the bottom of the tray.
The journals come last, because reflection needs somewhere to go afterwards. One is sangria, a deep wine; one is gray sand, a pale quiet greige; both carry the medallion generously in the lower corner of the cover, pressed blind.
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 Karen C. Klemens and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.