Sapphire Adventure Travel × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Sapphire Adventure Travel is Molly Bolotin's expedition and adventure travel practice, run from Hamilton, Montana. Her profile gives the origin plainly: eleven years in travel, and a first trip to Antarctica that set the course for everything since. She has crossed the Antarctic Circle twice, she says, and camped on the ice. She has taken the polar plunge. She has crossed the Drake Passage both ways a traveler can, under sail and by air, which is how you can tell she kept going back.
The name is what asked for the study. Sapphire is a deep-water word, and the water in her story is the deepest and coldest there is. Her current site sets the business name in straightforward page type, and we found ourselves wondering how that plain typography would take to leather. So we pressed it as found, and then allowed ourselves a proposal.
As found
The mark this study proposes
A faceted sapphire, cut by a clean waterline, so the same facets read as gemstone and as iceberg depending on where your eye starts. We tried sinking more of the stone below the line, which is truer to an actual berg, and lost the gem entirely; the waterline had to ride high, and the truth of the ice had to give a little. It stands above the full name, set portrait for a luggage tag.
Pressed
Blueberry follows the word Sapphire and the deep southern ocean of her story, and gray-sand follows ice and stone. Black carries the gold 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 Sapphire Adventure Travel and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.