The Crossing – a Wasilla, Alaska leather collection
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of original leather stamping studies. Volume I-C.
A September study.
Wasilla, Alaska sprang up in 1917 where the Alaska Railroad crossed the Carl Wagon Trail, and it still sits with a lake on either side and Hatcher Pass up the road. The Crossing is a collection of leather stamping studies for that town – luggage tags and journals for the people who live there and the people finding their way in.
First, the crossing itself. We drew the founding moment as a diagram – the rails running one way, the wagon ruts running the other, and WASILLA standing over the spot where they met in 1917.
Looks great when stamped onto the leather.
A catchall tray is where the day's pockets land, so the crossing went onto the golden tan tray at full size.
Next, the five ways in. The town's own visitor page says Wasilla can be reached by plane, train, automobile, snowmachine or dog sled – a sentence too good to leave unpressed, so we set all five in a ring around the name.
The black tag carries it in gold.
On the toiletry-bag stack, warm tan over deep brown, the ring sits small in the corner – a kit for arriving by any of the five.
Then, Hatcher Pass. The road out of town climbs into the Talkeetna Mountains and tops out at 3,886 feet, so we bent a road up through the peaks and wrote the number at the crest. Drawn from the map and the state's own description, so the peaks are ours – an honest interpretation.
The deep green tag reads like spruce below the treeline, and the warm mid-gray fob like the granite above it.
After that, the town between two waters. Wasilla keeps Wasilla Lake on one side and Lake Lucile on the other, birch and spruce holding the middle – so a journal cover carries both lakes by name, with the town's thin strip between them.
It sits on navy leather the color of the lakes under cloud.
And finally, the one that got us. The 1917 one-room schoolhouse still stands in the historic town site, and it opened with six students. We pressed the six desks and the year on the blackboard, with OPENED WITH SIX beneath – a journal cover for anything that starts small.
It looks genuinely beautiful on the pale warm greige.
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.
