The Last Flat Place – a Golden, Colorado leather collection
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies. Volume I-A.
A September study.
The Last Flat Place is a small leather collection for Golden, Colorado – the town where the plains run out against the Table Mountains and Clear Creek comes down cold from the peaks. Five stamps, for five ways the place introduces itself.
First, we took the low arch that spans Washington Avenue and set HOWDY FOLKS on its band, the street running out between the posts to the foothill that closes the view. A luggage tag felt right for a welcome – it announces where you're from before you do, and the design runs lengthwise the way the real arch spans the street.
The black tag carries the welcome in gold. The other two take it as a blind press, one in warm tan and one in deep wine.
Next, a freight wagon wheel with 1859 at the hub. The rush found little gold in the creek itself; the steadier fortune was made outfitting everyone headed uphill, and wheels like this one carried it. Pressed small on the fobs it looks just right – one in golden tan, one in deep espresso.
Then, for the toiletry bags, the American dipper – the round gray bird that walks under Clear Creek's current to feed and comes up singing. Of everything in the line, this bag spends the most time beside running water, so its corner now carries the bird that lives in it, on creek-stone gray over chestnut.
Then the tray. Clear Creek was first called Cannonball Creek, after the stones it tumbles round and smooth, so we ringed the old name with them. Keys and coins roll to a stop here the way the stones did. It looks genuinely beautiful in the golden tan.
And finally, the one we liked the most. Golden is the last flat place before the Rockies, and North Table Mountain holds the proof in basalt – a rim so level it reads as a ruled line. We set that rim above THE LAST FLAT PLACE on the journal cover; the flat place under it belongs to whoever is writing.
One journal in navy for the dusk sky behind the rim, one in honeyed russet for the horizon that burns beneath it.
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.
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