Walking Distance – a Longfellow, Minneapolis leather collection
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of original leather stamping studies.
A September study. Volume II.
Walking Distance is a leather collection for Longfellow, Minneapolis – the neighborhood with the Mississippi gorge a block east of its doors and Minnehaha Falls at its southern end. Everything stamped here, from the luggage tags to the journals, is something a local can walk to.
First, we drew Minneapolis to scale. Seen from the gorge, the skyline is a few small marks on the horizon; the river and the woods take the rest of the picture, and that is the honest proportion. The panel runs lengthwise along the luggage tags, the arch bridge far downstream and the city kept tiny beyond it.
We pressed it into pale sea-blue and navy for the water, then into honeyed russet for the autumn banks. Looks great when stamped onto the leather.
Next, we drew the bench at the southern end of the Winchell Trail from just behind, the way the path brings you up to it – a slatted seat on two concrete piers, and past the low parapet the river showing through the trees. We left the seat empty. The empty seat is the invitation.
It sits in the corner of the leather journals – deep green for the woods around it, pale greige for the parapet stone.
Then the savanna oak got the whole tray. The oaks above the gorge grow wider than they grow tall, because the open grass gives them room – so we spread one across the base at full size and wrote GROWN IN THE OPEN beneath it.
It looks genuinely beautiful on the golden tan leather.
Every one of those wide oaks began at pocket size, so we gave the keychains the acorn – the bur oak's shaggy-capped seed putting out its first sprout, with START SMALL written underneath. A good gift for anyone at the beginning of something.
One in warm caramel, one in deep green.
And finally, the crest for the whole idea. A little house sits at the center with WALKING DISTANCE and LONGFELLOW around the ring, and a few footsteps leave the door toward the river waves at three o'clock – due east, which is where the river actually is. We pressed it into the corner of the toiletry stack, navy over deep espresso, so the piece that travels farthest is the one that says where home is.
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 anything here made real, or anything changed – say hello through our contact page.
P.S.
