Situated Far Out – a leather collection from New Harbor, Maine
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of leather stamping studies.
An August study.
Situated Far Out is a small collection of leather goods rooted in New Harbor, Maine, and the seaward reach of the Pemaquid Peninsula. Five stamps, one per object, from luggage tags to journals – each pressing a piece of the place into the leather.
First, the name itself. Pemaquid is said to mean situated far out, so we lettered FAR OUT and let the land run on from the last letter – a long tapering point reaching seaward until it ends in a burst of light. It runs lengthwise along the luggage tags, in three leathers the coast already owns, from buoy red to fog-pale sand.
It looks genuinely beautiful.
Next, the rooms. Old houses on this coast grew sideways for a century, room by room, until walking through one meant always finding another door. We drew fifteen small rooms as a floorplan turned maze – a doorway in every wall, so the eye always finds a way through – and set ROOM AFTER ROOM beneath. It is pressed into the corner of the journals, deep wine and warm tan, where page after page works the same way.
Then the fog bell. When weather erases this coast, the bell keeps saying where it is – so we hung one mid-swing above three widening rings of sound and set IN ANY FOG beneath. Good words to carry on a key ring, in Atlantic navy and warm fog gray.
After that, the point itself. The ledges at the peninsula's end are ancient rock folded like cloth, so we took a single fold – the strata bending up together and coming back down – set one small wave on the crest and wrote PEMAQUID POINT beneath. It sits low in the corner of the toiletry bags, warm gray stone over dark espresso.
Looks great when stamped onto the leather.
And finally, the harbor as a gull sees it – two arms of land holding still water and boats swinging at their moorings, with NEW HARBOR arched across the top. A tray is a harbor too: at day's end, everything you carried comes to rest in it. We set it generous in the tray's golden tan.
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'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.