Hot snot on a silver platter

"One minute you're hot snot on a  silver platter, the next minute you're a cold booger on a paper plate."

My son Jake made that comment in a conversation last weekend with Stacy and I.

The  International Federation of Leather Guilds  held their 44th annual show last weekend in St Louis, MO. I didn't get to go to the show this year. I have only had the chance to go to one of these shows, Denver in 2005. I've been sending pieces to the show each year since. This year I entered the grizzly bear picture that Jan taught me how to do last spring and the bugling elk that Kathy Flanagan and I did as a partnership project. Both of these projects took first place ribbons at the show and the bear also took a ribbon for best of category. After the show was over, my friend Kate Dubiel posted a message on Facebook saying "this week you're hot snot".  Well if I was "hot snot" this week, I was in good company!  Kate took a first place with her game board at the show. Kathy took a couple more ribbons in the masters class. Several other friends also took ribbons at the show. Paul and Rosa Zalesak of Leather Wranglers posted  a bunch of pictures on Facebook from the show. Stacy and I are planning on being at the show next year in Albuquerque, NM.

Congratulations to everyone who was "hot snot" this week!

Brown Trout lesson is now available

I wanted to let everyone here know that lesson #3 in the Sculptured Leather Art lesson series with Jan Schoonover is now available from the Badlands Leather Art website. This lesson is a little different than the first two. Instead of hairing techniques, this one will teach you how to create scales and fins. As in all the lessons in this series, each step will have complete  instructions along with color photos to guide you from start to finish. 

I've begun working on lesson #4 but haven't gotten very far yet. As I mentioned in a previous post, the next lesson will be a mountain lion. I'll try and have it finished by the middle of November. 

A busy week off

I had a week off of work, so I spent it catching up on some leather projects. First off, I spent 3 days in Billings with Jan working on lesson #4 in our series of extreme embossed projects. This lesson will cover carving, embossing and coloring a mountain lion. We had hoped that by taking 3 days to do this one, the pace would be a little easier. As it turned out, we ended up working till 9 Thursday and Friday and till 5 on Saturday. We had a little problem with our embossing putty the first day. We had heard that all the boot and saddlemakers were starting to switch over to Petronio's brand rubber cement because of it's strength and fast drying properties. We found out that when it's mixed with leather dust to make putty, it does dry very quickly on the surface, but once it forms a scab on top, it doesn't dry underneath. We waited 2 hours and the putty hadn't even started to dry in the middle. We ended up scraping all the putty out and mixing up a new batch using Barge brand rubber cement. Even with the set back, we ended up finishing up the project on schedule on Saturday.

I spent most of Sunday and Monday finishing up a pair of chinks that my son Jake took an order for. If we're going to do more of these, we really need to get  a sewing machine that works for more than punching holes. It was my first time sewing an inlay into anything and my first time cutting fringe. Overall though, we were pretty happy with how they turned out. Good thing because we both have chaps started for ourselves that need to get finished up one of these days.

And finally, today I finished up the Brown trout lesson, #3 in the series. I'll send it off to Jan in the morning to let him check it out and see if there are any changes he wants made. Then as soon as I hear back from him, I'll get it to Kate and have her put it up on the website and make it available to those of you that have been waiting. Tomorrow it's back to work at my real job.