Lovin' Leather

I love the smell of leather. Some days, I admit, I satisfy my own guilty pleasure of sniffing new leather by browsing around at one of my favorite local shops, The Bootery. Two years ago, I surprised dear hubby with the Tandy Leather Deluxe Leathercraft Set because he'd expressed an interest in learning leatherwork and because I could take advantage of a great discount offer at the time. WIN-WIN!!!

But today I sort of got tired of looking at the box just sitting in the corner collecting dust. I decided to crack that baby open and pound out some designs myself! No reason this thing needed to waste away any longer.

Instructions! Oh, thank goodness for instructions! I started pulling out all the little pounding devices and felt a little lost. Some of them honestly looked the identical to me until I educated myself by reading the instructions

First things first, we trace our design onto the tracing paper. Easy enough. Then, we trace it onto the leather. Got it. It tears up the tracing paper pretty good - at least the way I did it managed to - so I probably should figure out if I need to secure my tracing paper for future projects.

 

Then we go in with the knife. It took me two passes to figure out the right way to hold this little contraption and get my cuts deep enough. So far, so good.

 More pounding. Lots of noise. Dogs barking like crazy, thinking someone's banging on the door. Me giggling at them, pounding more and more, giggling incessantly. It's like some mad scientist scene up in here!

But now...I'm lost...out of my comfort zone. Like so far out of it that I'm off the map. I don't feel like I got anything to look right. I even did it twice, pretty much destroying two leather discs, but that's what practice is for. The first time (above), I did not get that fern design even close, but the second time (below), I kind of impressed myself. 

After looking over my finished work a few hundred times in near total dissatisfaction, I realize I need to work on this. A lot. I really don't think I did the kind folks at Tandy Leather any justice with my work here. I'm so sorry, kind Tandy people. :( I'll work on my skills for next time, I promise. Practice, practice, practice.