Another swan photo album (finally finished)

I ended up having this whole week off of work due to a serius illness in my boss's family so I decided to try and finish up a project that I started on last winter. In an earlier post I showed the photo album that I made in an attempt to show my friend Crystal how I would carve this swan pattern. Only problem was, I didn't really know what I was going to do when I carved the first one, or how it was going to turn out, so I didn't bother to take pictures. So, this one was my second attempt, mainly so that I could take pictures as I went along to use in writting up a lesson. Once I had the pictures of the steps taken in carving it, there wasn't any big hurry to finish up the project so it sat on a shelf.

The carving of the album ended up looking pretty much the same as the first one, but the coloring ended up quite a bit different. I used dark cocoa brown eco flow dye for the background and was a little surprised at how DARK it really is. Then, since a judge at one of the shows I entered the original one in didn't care for the antique job I had done on the first one, I decided to go ahead and dye everything outside the border with the dark brown also. I didn't know what color to use for the border until I found a bottle of metalic bronze paint on one of my wife's shelves. I tried it on a piece of leather and found it was a pretty close match for some metalic bronze kangaroo lace that I have. I decided that maybe they would compliment each other, and along with the dark background, might make a very rich looking album. I spent almost 2 whole days painting on this album and was getting pretty frustrated with the way it was looking, but once the lace went on, it really seemed to tie everything together (really bad pun!) Anyway, here it is.