The Kelp Forest Collection – sea life pressed in leather – Volume I-C
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of original stamping studies.
Volume I-C. A September study.
The Kelp Forest Collection – five sea creatures, each caught doing the clever thing it actually does, pressed into leather, from luggage tags to journals. No morals were added; the animals supplied their own.
First, the sea otter. Before it sleeps, an otter wraps itself in a ribbon of kelp so the tide can't carry it off while it dreams – which is the whole job description of a luggage tag. We drew one mid-nap, rolled into its kelp, under the words SO NOTHING DRIFTS AWAY, and ran the design lengthwise along the tag.
Deep green like the kelp itself, and pale sea-blue like the water it naps on. The black tag carries the gold.
It looks genuinely beautiful.
Next, the holdfast – the actual biological name for the gripping root that fastens a kelp plant to its rock while everything above it climbs toward the light. We pressed it, rock and all, onto the object your hand finds a hundred times a day, with the one word standing underneath: HOLDFAST.
One keychain in deep green, kelp in the shade; one in golden tan, kelp in the sun.
Then, the octopus. A giant Pacific octopus can pour itself through any opening wider than its beak, the one rigid part it owns – a fact any traveler closing a full suitcase will recognize as aspirational. We stamped one mid-squeeze through a ring, over the words PACKS INTO ANYTHING, small in the corner of both bags.
Looks great when stamped onto the leather – honeyed russet over deep espresso brown, close to the animal's own rust.
A catchall tray, we realized, is a tide pool that lives indoors – the tide goes out of your pockets every evening and leaves its findings behind. So we ringed the base with the pool's residents around the words LOW TIDE, in golden tan like wet sand in the sun.
And finally, the moon jelly, drawn from directly above – the four pale lobes in the bell are how you know it on sight. A moon jelly lives its life in distinct, named phases, and a journal is where a life gets written down while it happens. PHASE BY PHASE sits small in the lower corner of the cover.
Looks absolutely gorgeous when stamped onto the leather – one journal in pale greige, the color of the bell, and one in navy, the water behind it.
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.