Leather- a more difficult design

So yes, you can do leather and just stick to your everyday stamps and shapes that you purchase, or you can do something a little more special. I've been working on a set of chargers for a family friend. He requested trillium flowers with a small border. The chargers (which in this case are going to be more similar to place mats rather than plates) extend an inch beyond his dinner plates all the way around, and will be stained Fudge Brown.

So I started out the design with a good bit of research. I needed the perfect shaped trillium blossom that I could stylize to go with the dinner plates. Here's the test piece, and how I did it:

The biggest challenge for me was figuring out how I was going to get 8 perfect circles that were all exactly the same. Improvise. I went to the kitchen, and low and behold, the top to the wok was exactly the size I needed. I set the pot top on the leather and cut with an exacto knife. Voila! I ended up using a whole double shoulder of leather for this, but it's going to be worth it.

PS... a double shoulder is the spread from the bottom of one shoulder of the cow, up over the withers, and to the bottom of the other. You can buy leather in a variety of sizes, including a double shoulder, or single shoulder!

The rest, save for scrap test pieces and other small projects!

I needed to match the design of the plates, but didn't want to take away from the design. I sketched a few versions, and put the final one on tracing paper.

To transfer an image from tracing paper to leather:

Wet your leather. It won't transfer if you don't wet it.

Set your pattern on top of the leather, pencil up. You don't want your pencil markings to go onto the leather, because it won't come out.

Here's where you're supposed to use what's called a stylus, but since money is tight, I use a mechanical pencil with no lead exposed. This is just to make a mark in your leather that is faint and usually is covered by any tooling that you would do. Trace just hard enough so that the image will transfer, but not so hard that you will rip your paper. Remember, wet paper rips easily. I almost tried to make a joke about the durability of wet toilet paper, but I'll hold my tongue today. :)

Once your design is transferred, my best suggestion is to use a swivel knife to cut along the lines you just transferred so that when stamping, the relief area will be more pronounced. Starting with the forground, stamp along the outer edge with a smooth, flat, square stamp. (B201-00 from the Tandy website)

On my trillium chargers, I did the flower petals first, and then the leaves. I then used a smooth tear dropped shape stamp to give the leaves some texture. Leaves aren't perfectly smooth, so neither will mine. I used a few other stamps to give the flower some interest, and then used the swivel knife to give the leaves veins. Use your judgement on the details and accents. Anything to spice it up will help.

Enjoy! I'll follow up with more pictures of the finished product. This image is a sample for the colors, so I don't know how it will be stained in the end.