The Daily Jurassic – a leather stamping collection of dinosaur trace fossils
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of leather stamping studies.
A September study – Volume II.
The Daily Jurassic – a small leather collection about ordinary days in the Early Jurassic. About 198 million years ago, soft mud on a desert lakeshore wrote down whatever the day brought – a rest taken, a shower passing – and filed it away. We pressed a few of those days into leather.
First, the rest stop. One small dinosaur walked in across the wet mud, sat down – hands and all – then stood and walked away dragging its tail, and the whole episode survives as a single trace. We set it along the luggage tag, from the walk in to the walk away, under the words REST STOP. Travel has always included one.
We ran it across golden tan and pale greige – sunlit sandstone and dried silt. The black tag carries the design in gold.
Next, the hands. When the sitter set its hands down, it held them with the claws curled inward – among the rarest marks any dinosaur left, and direct evidence of how those hands were carried. On the keychain fob the two handprints face each other over the words CLAWS IN – sound policy for anything that shares a pocket with keys.
Looks great when stamped onto the leather – one fob in mottled chestnut, one in lake navy.
Then the toiletry bags took the weather. A shower crossed the shore one Early Jurassic day, and the mud kept every drop as a small round crater – a rain check the ground has been holding ever since. That scatter sits in the corner of the wash bag, the one object in the house still headed for water, above the words RAIN CHECK. Lake navy above, dark espresso below – water over lakebed.
Then the catchall tray took the census. The dinosaurs made the famous prints, but the same shore holds marks from the whole neighborhood – crocodile cousins and passing swimmers, fern fronds and rain. We set six specimens in a ring around the finding itself: EVERYONE LEAVES SOMETHING. A catchall obeys the same law – by evening, everyone has.
Looks absolutely gorgeous stamped into the golden tan.
And finally, the one we liked the most. The track floor runs deeper than one surface: at least twenty five layers in the stone carry tracks, a closed book with every page finished. A journal is the same instrument in faster material, so its corner carries the strata with one small walker on top, over the words TWENTY FIVE PAGES OF STONE. One journal in deep wine, one in pale greige – an old binding and a blank page.
It looks 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.
