Small Fortunes – a leather collection for game night in Broomfield, Colorado
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of leather stamping studies, this volume a collection of original designs.
A September study – Volume II.
Small Fortunes is a leather collection for game night in Broomfield, Colorado – every design in it tells a little of the future, from the shuffle that levels it to the roll that decides it. A dice tray anchors the set; luggage tags and campaign journals travel with it.
First, the shuffle, the opening rite we chose for the collection. We caught a deck at the top of its bridge, the two halves falling back into one, and set the truth of the ritual underneath – THE DECK REMEMBERS NOTHING. Last week's luck is gone from it; that is the promise the stamp makes.
We ran it lengthwise along the luggage tags – once in warm red for the red deck, once in navy for the blue.
The black tag carries the shuffle in gold foil.
Next, the keychains. We stood a knight over its own move, dotted out to the turn – NEVER IN A STRAIGHT LINE. That is how the piece travels, and how a good game gets where it is going.
We pressed it on pale greige, the board's light square, and on black, the dark one. Looks great when stamped onto the leather.
The black fob carries the knight in gold, gilded like a prize piece.
The same move goes low into the corner of the toiletry bags, navy over chestnut, for the weekends the table travels – the long way round being the whole point of a trip.
Then, the campaign journals. We borrowed the cartouche from the old atlases – the scrolled frame where a mapmaker signs a coastline – and set inside it the only honest title for a campaign atlas: PLACES ONLY WE HAVE BEEN. The maps themselves go on the pages, in whatever hand keeps the record.
Pressed into the deep green of old map plates and into the navy of their oceans, in the lower corner where a cartouche belongs.
And finally, the leather dice tray, where the collection gets its name. We read each roll as a small telling of fortune, so we ruled the golden tan base as a star chart and corrected the idiom around its band: THE STARS FALL WHERE THEY MAY. The middle stays open on purpose; every roll lays a new sky down inside the ring, and the tray reads it without comment.
It looks absolutely gorgeous when stamped onto the leather.
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.
P.S.
