Week 11: Warm Leatherette

To help atone for last week's "gluing stuff to other stuff" crafting theme, I decided to pick up a medium I haven't used much before: Leather.  A couple of years ago I picked up some leather (and pleather!) skirts at Goodwill for practically nothing.  My intent was always to turn them into something, and thanks to this blog I actually got around to it!  Eventually.  I did also grab a bag of leather remnants from Joann's to help supplement my color supply; unsurprisingly the skirts I had gotten were all black except the one pleather snakeskin print skirt.

The other awesome thing about this week is it gave me a great opportunity to put my recently purchased Sizzix Big Kick to work.  One of the touted features that eventually led me to purchase a machine was that the dies could cut through fabric, as well as paper and card stock.  The other feature I was into was the embossing feature.  I managed to use both the cutting and the embossing functions while putting together this week's projects.  Woohoo!  I love gettin' my money's worth.  Anyway, on to the items!

Hair Flower!  I used a die to cut the different flowers.  Then I used fabric stiffener to make it hold its shape, and placed my very first rivet in the center to hold it all together.  I used Tsukineko chalk based inks to add the turquoise color. I ran the brown leather flowers through the embosser, but after the leather was pretty thin so you can't really tell.  Still, it does add a bit more texture to the overall piece so I'm not complaining.  : )

I liked the first hair flower I made so much that I made it some friends!  These were made of thinner leather/pleather, so  I sewed them together and added a bead to the center.  These are all glued to a felt backing, then glued to an alligator clip.  Because industrial strength is the only type of equipment that will stay in my hair!

Butterfly wing earrings.  These were also die cut.  I am really having a butterfly thing lately, and this is the first project I've tried that actually looked the way I wanted it to when finished.  Hurray!

Die cut circles that I ran through the embosser to give them texture.  I really like how these turned out and can't wait to emboss more stuff.  I see a lot of hand made leather components in my future!

Hand cut squares, linked together with super short Japanese 2 in 1 chains.  Punching all the holes in the little squares way more time than I thought it would but I'm pretty happy with the results.

Hand cut leather "feather" earrings.  These took FOR-EV-ER.  First I cut the shapes, then I "fringed" them, then i took super tiny slices out of the fringe cuts to give them a more raggedy look.  Without the extra cuts they looked pretty smooth and not feathery at all.

Steampunk has invaded everything!  These are die cut gears that I arranged and glued together using my trusty sidekick, FabriTac.  I then cut a two piece felt base, glued the gears to the top, glued the ribbon to the "back" of the top, and then glued the final layer on top of the ribbons to sandwich them in so their ends weren't exposed.  I wanted to do it with chain instead of a bib, but it didn't quite look right.  The background grey makes it look like a more cohesive piece.

And my favorite, the leather leaf.  I'm so stupid pleased with this necklace.  Only about 1 in every 20 projects turns out EXACTLY the way I imagined it in my head, and this is definitely one.  I embossed the die cut leaf and then ran it through an embossing folder.  I then used the same Tsukineko chalk inks from the hair flower to highlight the embossed area, and sealed it with an acrylic spray.  It was a little plain on it's own, and I had a hard time figuring out what to put with it to give it some extra flair.  Then I remembered that I had some amazing Labradorite that had "flash" similar to the ink color.  I wire wrapped three of them and threw them on the ring bail.  I think they work really well together!

So, yay leather!  I really and truly enjoyed my foray into this medium.  I've got about half a dozen more ideas in my journal for future leather projects, so expect another leather week sometime in the next 41 weeks.  Again, thanks for looking!