I’ve got proofgrade leather which is nice and flat and masked, but I also have a bunch of 4-5 oz. veg tanned leather so I wanted to do some testing on it before I attempt some bigger pieces. I made some mistakes on this one that I’ll hopefully learn from for the next project as I work my way up in size.
- The material is thicker than the proofgrade that the luggage tag was designed for. My quick glance at it thought there wasn’t anything that had to be adjusted, just needed more thread. But that was wrong, that little wrap-around bit assumes thickness in a couple of ways: slot and tab and it has to fit around two thickness of leather too. I’m redoing it because, as you can see from the pic, I mangled the ends with the pliers I used to force it to fit.
- I masked before hand and forgot about the crease I was going to avoid. You can see it in the lower right and the antique stain highlighted it quite well.
- Acrylic kinda works for the stamp, but the 1/8" proofgrade is too fragile once you engrave it deeply. So I used some 6 mm stuff I had already. The thin details are also fragile so a couple of uses and those break into little bits. I’m going to try some delrin that I have on order from McMaster-Carr.
- It’s harder than I thought to get a deep enough impression to hold the antique gel I used to make to low areas darker like I expected, but the accidental and random variation worked for me aesthetically anyway. Something to think about a bit more on the next one.
have tossed it around. I don’t think anyone will see the small imperfections any more.