Cross-cultural Inspiration and Whacking Leather

It's amazing how sometimes many disparate influences come together.

Colonial Days

Way back in March or April, my daughter's fifth grade class studied American colonial times. The teachers and parents put together an elaborate simulation of "Colonial Williamsburg", complete with tavern, church, government, leatherworking (cobbler), butter-making, and so on.


My part was the leatherworking activity, and of course I chose that one because I had never done leatherworking before! Arranging and participating in the activity was my first try at leatherworking. Fortunately I had lots of excellent help from Andy Stasiak of the local Tandy Leather Factory store--he even taught the kids himself! The kids loved the skunk skin he brought (though most of them wouldn't touch it).


A whole class of kids whacking leather!


That was a really noisy classroom! It was fun, though, and I learned that the mysterious toolset my dad had given me some time before was actually a pretty complete leatherworking set. I didn't do much with it at that point, though, other than play with it a bit.

Mexico and China

In Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries, there is a craft called "papel picado", or "punched paper". Papel picado is created by using punch tools to make designs in multiple layers of brightly colored tissue paper. A few months ago, I was looking at paper picado designs with the goal of replicating them (somewhat) in my tie-dye. While I never managed to get exactly the results I wanted, I learned about another art form, and I did make a couple of fun tie-dyed banners.

Later, when I was visiting Japantown with the middle-schoolers, I bought some books. Besides books on shibori, I bought a book called "Cutting Paper Work of China". Well, it was probably called something else, but it was in Japanese, as was almost all of the text. What little English text there was (on the dust jacket) said that the book covered a folk art called "senshi". Senshi was/is practiced by housewives in China who cut paper into intricate designs of animals, flowers, and so on using scissors and small knives. Many of the designs and motifs struck me as being similar to papel picado, and the designs are fascinating in their own right.

Forward to Today...

All these things come together in my planning to make myself a tooled leather belt to replace yet another flimsy belt that is falling apart (and threatening to let me and my jeans down). Being the perfectionist I am, I want my (first) belt to be perfect, so I started practicing my leatherwork skills on something smaller: keychains/backpack tags/Christmas ornaments.

The first ones were pretty simple. I simply did individual capital letters with a border. I got lettering inspiration from another book, "The Art of Creative Lettering" by Becky Higgins, that I had handy from my scrapbooking days years ago.


Later, I started to branch out into birds and animals. Papel picado and my Chinese paper cutting book gave me ideas (such as the adapted bird on the branch, below), and I browsed the Internet for pictures of kittens and other creatures. I found pictures of peacocks in their full glory at http://www.peafowl.org (I had no idea there were so many types of peafowl!). The flower design in the upper right corner came from a Tandy pattern.


Tooling the Leather

There is a specific sequence for a lot of decorative leather tooling. First, you draw the pattern on paper, then dampen the leather (called "casing the leather") and trace the lines with a stylus (kind of like a ball-point pen with no ink). That gives the design on the leather like this kitten below (the lighter lines are where I used the stylus directly on the leather instead of through the paper).


You cut along the lines using a special leather cutting swivel knife (right, below). Beveling along the cut edge with a beveling tool (left, below) and a mallet gives the picture definition (see above and below the paws, and in the ears for beveling).


I used various stamping tools to refine the picture, adding stars to the pillow, and so on.


I used the knife again to make little cuts for the whiskers at the very end.

How About Some Color?

I also added color to several pieces. I used Tandy's Eco-Flo All-in-One finishes to both color and protect the pieces. In the picture below, I colored all four. The J, A, and M are all using the same Mariner Blue color, but I have rubbed the M with a piece of an old cotton dishtowel to make it shiny.


For the A in the following picture, I have rubbed the left side only. The All-in-One works really well--it only takes about 4-6 strokes with the cloth to get the leather shiny! I do more strokes to get the piece as shiny as possible all over.


For scale, the leather pieces I'm using are all about 2.5 inches tall.

Here are some pieces that I painted more elaborately with various colors of the All-in-One.

Diluting the paints gives a whole new range of possibilities.


Ooh, Ooh, Me Too!

My kids decided the leatherwork looked like to much fun to let me do it undisturbed. They jumped right in, putting their own spin on letters and other designs. My younger daughter found a dolphin design in a coloring book, and adapted it with her own ideas. She did two of those plus several others.


My older daughter did both pictorial pieces and geometric pattern pieces, though she wasn't interested in painting them:

We even had a couple of my older daughter's friends over to do some. They had a blast (and I thought the ringing in my ears would never go away!).

Gratuitous Dog Pictures

Lacey didn't get much chance to help out on these little projects, but I thought she could model some of them.

I think maybe it's just a bit overmuch on the bling, dahling!


To Be Continued at Some Point...

I'm having so much fun with my little keychains that it will probably take me a while to get around to doing the belt I'm planning (and there is still that jeans circle quilt languishing on the sewing machine). It's just so much fun to create all these little miniature works of art!

Painting Fire

One of my favorite hobbies has nothing to do with textiles, but everything to do with color. In one of my other lives, I'm a scenic artist for a local Gilbert & Sullivan theater company, the Stanford Savoyards. I enjoy painting fantasy worlds for fairies ("Iolanthe"), Venetian gondolas and mythical kingdoms ("Gondoliers"), and so on.

The main drawback to painting theater sets is their impermanence. Once the show is over, set pieces often get dumpstered, or they go back to the shop and usually get painted over for the next show. Even though a piece has had 40 hours of detailed painting work, if it isn't generic enough to use again, out it goes. I once painted a Yosemite scene for the mythical kingdom of Barataria, and I was really proud of it. But the curtain was barely closed before that one got recoated. I painted an eight-foot-high picture of the Hindu deity Ganesha for our "Bollywood Sorcerer", complete with many symbolic details. During the build for the next show, we held a small goodbye ceremony before He was painted over.


Opportunities to paint fun but permanent scenery outside of the theater are limited. Once in a while a mural comes along, but not often, and people pretty much line up for those. As for painting the walls in my house (if I could even find them), their very permanence is paralyzing, and they stay white. Besides, my kids would complain if I painted on the walls and didn't let them do so too! But once in a while, I can make an opportunity.

A Place

My father-in-law will be living in the house I am remodeling, and he doesn't plan to use the fireplace (this is California, after all). The fireplace isn't particularly pretty, and it lets in a wicked draft, even if all the doohickeys are properly closed. So I got somebody to make me a fireplace cover out of plywood to fit snugly over the opening.

What to paint on the fireplace cover? A fireplace with a fire in it, of course! Not terribly original, perhaps, but fun to paint, and that's what I care about.

Painting

"I see a fireplace and I want to paint it black..." This is the plywood cover. It looked a little blah completely unpainted, so I started by painting it black with a little grey highlighting around the edges.

Years of painting in the Stanford Savoyards set crew have made their mark--I love blue masking tape!

Now I'm starting to put the bricks on with a natural sponge. I mix colors right on the sponge. A little water helps to blend the colors more.

Here I've removed the mortar-masking tape, but I save it for covering sections later. Time to tweak the mortar colors bit by bit. At this point a couple people do a doubletake as they wonder why I'm putting blue tape on the fireplace! I'm still having various contractors wandering through finishing up on the remodeling.

Time to light the fire...

A couple hours later, it's looking good enough to call it "done"--of course, now that I'm looking at the photo, I see things I want to go back and fix! ("Sara, step AWAY from the paints!")

Now I've put back the real fireplace screen we've had there for years. The whole thing took me somewhere between 8 and 10 hours. This is for my father-in-law's house, and now I'm thinking my house needs one too. Of course, first I'd have to FIND our fireplace! It's behind some huge shelves full of kids' craft supplies. Maybe another time...


I'd say that fire is a good start on a housewarming!

Just White, Please

I'm deep in the middle of a house remodel. Once again I'm awestruck by the myriad of big and little choices one makes even for a "minor" change.

For example, I'm replacing the handles on the kitchen cabinets. Happily, the size of the handle is fixed, since the existing handles have screw holes 3 inches apart (the centers). Phew, one big decision out of the way! But now, do I want the chrome, bronze, stainless, brushed nickel, wrought iron, or plastic finish? Modern, traditional, funky? What design out of hundreds, even thousands of possibilities? How much do I want to pay? And how many stores do I visit to find just the right ones? And will they have enough of the prized handles of choice in stock, or will I have to order them and wait?

The whole house is ripe with promise and infinite possibilities. We're doing two bathrooms and three bedrooms, along with "minor" changes such as new carpeting throughout the rest of the house. Some of those possibilities can be reined in a bit by a few factors. Money is always the biggest factor, of course. Existing architecture plays a part, since the house is a "Mid-Century Modern" house lovingly known as an "Eichler" (the developer's name was Joseph Eichler). It's got post-and-beam construction and floor-to-ceiling glass. This is the San Francisco Bay area, and the house was built to luxuriate in warm California weather well before the energy crisis. It's got straight clean lines, not suited to Victorian frippery or Colonial whatsits. Let's just say that a Mondrian painting would look right at home here, or maybe a minimalist Zen garden. Anyway, that cuts out a lot of choices right there--unfortunately many of the choices currently in style for bathroom vanities!

But what I've really been thinking about is color. I'm in love with color, and lots of it (yes, the tie-dye obsession is kind of a hint). But when it comes to a house interior, well, I tend to gravitate towards white. White walls, maybe with a darker carpet that won't show so much of the dirt (gotta be practical, after all). White walls make a wonderful backdrop for the adornments of color that I put up on those walls.

I have friends who have a house they have painted all sorts of wonderful rich luscious colors, and I love it, but I can't do it myself. For one thing, while I know it doesn't have to be, I tend to view paint as permanent, rather than something I can change when the whim takes me (mostly because it would be yet another project I'd never finish). For me, paint is a commitment. Also, if I give in to painting different rooms different colors, it opens up an even bigger infinity of choices to make, and I become paralyzed and unable to choose anything. And what if I choose and I'm wrong? I'm committed to that color for life. Actually, my friends painted their livingroom a color that turned out to be more of a butter yellow than they had expected. They decided they hated it, and then they painted it again to a more pleasing gold color. I'm in awe that they could do that--I can't.

So I choose white. The contractor asks what color I want the windows: white. Well, actually it's almond. The sink? White. Well, actually it's biscuit. The bathtub? White. Well, actually it's... oh, Kohler says the tub is white. But their white looks a little more blue than the white of the white vanity top I see. And paint? Kelly-Moore alone has an entire brochure just of their "white" paint colors, and it only includes their "popular" whites! Do I want warm whites? Cool whites? Neutral whites? Bright whites? Dark whites?

Maybe I should head for bed and dream of a world that comes in just black and white. But would that be midnight black? Stormy black? Black hole black? Black black? "We're not kidding, we really mean it, this is black" black?

Ooooh, my head hurts.