Featured Artist

There's a mini-interview with me on the following blog, check it out!
www.awleather.blogspot.com

A big thank you to my teammates on that blog, it's great to be a part of the Etsy Leather Team (officially, the Association of Workers in Leather, hence the AWL name as well as wordplay for one of the more common tools of the leather trade). They're a talented bunch of artisans from all four corners of the globe, and we all work with leather in some form, shape or another.

In our team forums, we discuss leather techniques, ask questions, share our frustrations and our joys as well -- we've even swapped leather from one studio to the next, as one artisan's overstock of mushroom-colored suede becomes another artisan's dream project.

If you haven't shopped on Etsy before, now is the time to start. It's an online marketplace for everything handmade, handcrafted, and handsome... you'll love it!

Leather Confetti

I began work on a custom leather jacket. First step seems to be, making a mess.

This is my new leather hole punch, along with some of the zillions of "holes" from making leather eyelets in the new jacket. Each panel of the jacket will be entirely punched by hand, creating a feminine, lacy effect in the leather.

The silk charmeuse lining will be a gorgeous lavender shade, just one tone lighter than the plum leather -- you can see here how the leather was originally embossed to look like ostrich. I'm scattering my eyelets in triangular-shaped groups of three, a nice odd number. (Ever notice how jackets always have either three, five, or seven buttons? There is a DaVinci code for fashion too!)

There's lots of work yet to be done -- the amount of punching is actually bruising my hand, ow ow! -- but I am *so* pleased with the effect.