Monday, February 8, 2010

Hops Money Clip Creation/ How to transfer image onto leather


So I had a recent request to do a really fun project. I never really thought it would turn out, but I got lucky! I was asked to do a money clip with a hops cone on the front.
Now for anyone like me, I knew hops was a brewing ingredient, but I didn't know much else.

This is what wikipedia told me: "Hops are the female flower clusters (commonly called cones or strobiles)... They are used primarily as a flavoring and stability agent in beer." I should have known this, being in one of the main brewery towns for Budweiser...

So first I needed a design. I was told by my local beer expert (also known as boyfriend) that the leaves were particularly beautiful too. So after some research, I found my cone image (and borrowed some pictures of the leaves from other sites...


I bought a leather craft kit from Tandy Leather Factory, mainly because I'm too lazy to cut the leather myself into perfect shape. (those hole punchers make little hands quite sore!)

I traced the hops cone and leaves using tracing paper, and transferred it to the leather. For anyone not familiar, it's pretty easy: lightly wet your leather, place tracing paper LEAD SIDE UP on your leather, and trace! I use a mechanical pencil with no lead sticking out. The proper tool is a stylus.
I then used a swivel knife to cut around each line- including the veins of the leaves. For the primary and most bold of the veins, I cut fairly deep. The rest simply branch off of that.
As far as tooling goes, all I did was use an angled beveler around each layer of the hop cone and then under the smooth part of the leaves.

Next came the painting, staining, and assembly. Voila! Maybe next project I'll focus on painting and staining.

Any requests? :)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Can you make me one?