The Crossing Collection – a Reno, Nevada leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies in leather.
An August study.
The Crossing Collection is a set of five original leather stamps rooted in Reno, Nevada – a town built where mountain water crosses the high desert. We pressed them into luggage tags, journals and the rest of the small-leather shelf.
First, the river. The Truckee runs straight through downtown, so we ran it straight through the name – one white channel cutting the word RENO from bank to bank.
Looks great when stamped onto the leather – here on pale sea-blue and deep green. The black tag carries the gold.
Next, we re-weighed the town's famous boast for the smallest thing on the shelf. On a keychain, LITTLE is the word doing the work, so LITTLE got the big letters.
On the black fob the gold reads like neon after dark; the warm red keeps daylight hours.
Then a sprig of sagebrush for the toiletry bags – the plant that smells like rain coming to the high desert, with THE SAGEBRUSH STATE arched over it.
The catchall tray got the Great Basin itself. Every river here stays – the mountains catch the water and keep it. We drew that rim of peaks around an empty middle, which is also the working principle of a tray, pressed at generous size into golden tan.
And finally, the nib. Reno is still collecting stories about its river, so we let a river start at the point of a pen – WRITE THE RIVER, pressed into the corner where a journal begins.
It turned out genuinely beautiful.
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.
