Take Me There Travel by Michelle × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A July study.
Take Me There Travel by Michelle is the working banner of Michelle Kindvall, whose site header says it plainly in clean black type: Michelle Kindvall, Personal Travel Planner. Our own notes file her in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Her page is a Wix build that still speaks mostly in the template’s voice; the title block reads “I'm a title. Click here to add your own text and edit me.” and the footer credits “© 2023 by Personal Life Coach. Proudly created with”, a sentence that stops short of naming its maker and remembers a tenant who lived there before her. We find this endearing in a way we can defend. A planner who spends her days sending other people to finished places has left her own shop front half unpacked, and the part that matters most made it onto the wall first, her name and her trade.
The name asked for this study before the page did. Take me there. An instruction handed across a desk, and its whole weight lands on the last word. For a day we considered pressing the template’s borrowed paragraph into leather as a kind of found poetry, then thought better of it; a luggage tag should carry the one thing on that page which is entirely hers, and that is the name.
As found
The mark this study proposes
We titled the proposal PINNED ON THERE, since the name supplies a destination and a mark ought to reach it. A route of five thick dashes enters at the upper left and swings through one easy S-curve, and the last dash lands on a solid teardrop pin with an open circle counter. The pin hangs point down over THERE, as tall as the capitals beneath it, its tip nearly grazing them. TAKE ME and THERE stack at center, the second at twice the cap height of the first; below them, TRAVEL BY MICHELLE runs small and letterspaced out to the full width of the big word. Everything else stays home. The route does the traveling.
Pressed
Both settings went on lengthwise, the as-found type and the pinned proposal alike. They ran on a pale sea-blue that borrows the open water in the site’s coastal accents and a pale gray-sand that keeps the quiet of its neutral page ground. Black with gold foil closes the set, and there the pin reads like a brass tack pushed into a midnight wall map.
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 Take Me There Travel by Michelle and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.