Sixty Trades – a Doylestown leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world logos.
An August study.
Doylestown believes, more plainly than any town we know, that ordinary tools deserve a monument. We took that belief at its word and cut a small leather collection for the town – we call it Sixty Trades.
First, the die that named it. We set twelve old hand tools in a ring, the way this town once set sixty whole trades inside one hand-poured concrete tower, and put SIXTY TRADES at the center.
We pressed it into the corner of the journals – one in a deep old-tool espresso, one in the green of the surrounding woodlands.
Looks great when stamped onto the leather.
Then at generous size across the base of a golden-tan catchall tray, where the ring gets to hold real pocket hardware every evening.
On the toiletry bags it sits low in the corner, concrete gray stacked over chestnut.
Next, we hung a whaleboat in the air. Somewhere in this town a full boat floats overhead, sharing the rafters with a stagecoach, and LOOK UP is the only instruction a first-time visitor needs.
It stands upright on the luggage tags. Two of the three take their color from the masonry – a poured-concrete gray and a honeyed russet clay – and the third is cobalt navy, for the tile glaze.
And finally, a true story. While the concrete was still setting, a dog walked through it, and the builders kept the prints. So the keychains read WET CONCRETE, with a line of paw prints trotting straight across the warning – one fob in concrete gray, one in warm caramel.
The paw-print keychains look just awesome too.
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.