Strawberry Point – a leather stamping collection from Gustavus, Alaska
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of leather stamping studies.
A September study – Volume I-A.
Strawberry Point is a small leather collection from Gustavus, Alaska – the town at the mouth of Glacier Bay that was called Strawberry Point before it was called anything else. We designed five stamps around its coastal landscape, from the wild strawberries still hiding in the beach meadows to the mossy Sitka spruce forest standing behind them, and pressed each one into leather.
First, the name itself. We set STRAWBERRY POINT in letterspaced capitals and let a wild strawberry runner wander beneath the words, hanging its fruit under the final letters – so the luggage tag carries the town's first name wherever the bag goes.
The warm red tag is the ripe berry and the deep green one is the spruce wall behind the meadow; the warm caramel tan is the dry beach grass between them.
Next, the flower that follows the ice. When a glacier pulls back in Glacier Bay, moss arrives first and fireweed comes close behind – the first real color on the bare rock. So a single fireweed spire rises over the words AFTER THE ICE in the lower corner of the toiletry bags, and the stack pairs warm gray over chestnut, the rock and the raw ground the flower actually blooms against.
Then, the fruit at pocket scale. Gustavus wild strawberries are tiny, and the people who find them call them intensely sweet – so one small berry hangs above the words INTENSELY SWEET on the keychains.
On the deep green fob it reads leaf on leaf. The black fob carries the gold – the one gilded berry in the collection.
Then we set the whole foreland into the catchall tray – the flat water of Icy Strait at the bottom, the beach and the flowering meadow above it, the dark spruce wall under a low mountain line, and GUSTAVUS across the open sky.
It looks genuinely beautiful pressed into the golden tan.
And finally, the journals. In the forest behind town, fallen spruce trunks become nurse logs – new trees root in the old ones and grow straight up out of them. Three seedlings rise from a mossy fallen trunk over the words NURSE LOG in the cover's corner, which is more or less what a journal is for. Once in deep forest green, once in deep espresso brown.
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 any of these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.
P.S.
