Tina Croff, Leather-fantasy.com

Following up on the comment by Stacy that I have a lot of very talented and generous friends, here's a holster that was given to me by Tina Croff. Tina definitely is a talented leather artist. She comes up with some of the neatest designs, and her coloring is some of the best I have ever seen. To top it off, she's only been carving leather for a couple years!!! I absolutely love how she did the roses on this holster, the depth of the carving, the little irregularities in the petals, the shades of color and the contrast with the black background. I'm really proud to have this piece in my collection of leather art.

Tina has also been very generous in sharing some of the patterns that she has come up with. A couple of them were used on Leatherworker.net when I was doing the monthly carving challenges. Actually, the idea for the monthly challenges came to me when I saw her "PMS Lioness" carving. The zebra was another pattern she shared with us all on LW and was also used as a monthly challenge. I combined these patterns and used them on a photo album that I use to display much of my leather work. (the Sheridan portion of the pattern was drawn and shared by Clay Miller). I made several photo albums using the zebra pattern and the one shown here took a first place and best of category at an IFOLG show.

















A while ago, I was planning on making a purse for Stacy and I was having trouble coming up with a pattern. Stacy had seen a design on something Tina had done that she really liked. I asked Tina if it would be possible for her to draw me up a pattern for the purse, and she agreed. The pattern was a little challenging for me to carve, but it worked perfectly on the purse.

Tina is just a really great artist, and an even better friend. She just recently moved back from Michigan to her home, Sweden and it seems that her website is down but you can see a lot more of her work on her deviant art site . Thanks Tina for all your help, inspiration, and of course, the holster!!