A trip to the Black Hills

Last weekend, Stacy and I  traveled down to South Dakota where I had been asked to help judge the leather craft at the Central States Fair with my good friend Kathy Flanagan. We arrived in Rapid City a little early so I got to do a little shopping at the Tandy store there and met the new manager. Then when Kathy and her daughter Sheena arrived, we headed straight over to the fair grounds for the judging. Just a couple years ago, there were 3 leather entries in the fair, this year there were 53. We spent the next several hours going over each item, trying to point out what was done well,  what could use improvement, and deciding what ribbons each entry should receive.  Sheena was a big help writing down all our comments. By the time we had finished, we were the only ones left in the room. It must be easier to judge wine and food :o)   There was a lot of really nice leather work displayed in this show. The Dakota Territory Leather Guild should be proud of the job they did with this show.


We got to spend the rest of the weekend wandering around the Black Hills. Saturday morning we took a trip to Bear Country. Bear Country is always a fun place to go. I'm not sure there is anyplace you can see so many animals up close. It was close to 100 degrees there, even early in the morning so the animals weren't doing much but laying around and panting, but it was still fun to see them all.

In the afternoon, we ran back over to the fair for a little bit, then went to Hill City and took a ride on the 1880's train. The train runs from Hill City to Keystone and back and is a relaxing way to spend a few hours enjoying the scenery.

After the train ride, we made a quick trip through Needles Highway and Custer State Park. On our way through the park, we got to see a herd of big horn rams right beside the road.

We wanted to get to tunnels on Iron Mountain Road  before dark. This is a really cool road with 3 tunnels and several cools bridges. The tunnels are located so that when you are driving through them, you can see Mt Rushmore through the tunnel.

We barely made it to the tunnels before dark, so we didn't get a chance to take any good pictures, but here's one from a previous trip. From here, we continued on to Mt Rushmore to see the faces on the mountain lighted up.

Then it was back to Rapid for a late supper. On Sunday, we drove the Nemo road through more of the beautiful Black Hills to Deadwood. We've been wanting to see Kevin Costner's Tatanka center for a couple years but never got through there when it was open. We spent a couple hours there learning about bison and the Lakota indians. They've got a HUGE statue of indians on horses chasing bison over a buffalo jump that is pretty awesome.

By the time we were through there, it was early afternoon and time for all of us to head for home. It was a fun trip just like all our trips to SD have been.

Gone Fishin

I spent the weekend "fishing"  in Billings with Jan Schoonover.  Not trying to catch them, but learning how to carve them. On this trip, we worked on a Brown Trout picture. I've never done an embossed fish before so this was new to me and it was a fun lesson. I learned some new  techniques that will be in the next lesson in our series. Once again, it was a marathon session on Saturday getting the carving, texturing and embossing done. It's a pretty good challenge trying to keep up with Jan along with taking notes and pictures for the lesson, but somehow it always works out. I also had to make a quick run over to Montana Leather to pick up a few things. We called it a day around 7 on Saturday (a long day since I had to be up at 3:30 in the morning to get to Billings by 9). On Sunday we did the touch up work on the picture and Jan painted his fish. There is quite a bit of coloring involved in this project but Jan makes it look easy. I didn't color mine as I wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything that needed to go into the lesson. I'll color mine when things slow down around here. This coming weekend, Stacy and I are headed to Rapid City where Kathy Flanagan and I are judging the leather work in the Central States Fair on Friday. Then we are going to just hang around in the Black Hills with Kathy for a couple days. That's going to be a lot of fun!

Here's a picture of Jan's completed trout.

And here is a picture of my trout, without any color yet.  Stacy really likes the picture without any color so I will probably end up doing another one so I can have one colored, and one natural. 

Jan and I talked about ways to try and get more feedback on the lessons we are putting out. We'd love to get comments, questions and pictures of people's projects. In order to encourage people to send us pictures of the projects they make from these lessons, we are thinking of having a contest. We haven't worked out the details yet, but what we are thinking of is picking one picture of a completed project from each lesson and that person will receive a free lesson.  I'll post the details on this as soon as we work them out. 

I'll try and have the Brown Trout lesson finished up by mid September. It looks like the next lesson on the list will be a mountain lion, and after that, possibly a buffalo. If things work out, we'd like to get both of those done yet this year. 

Black Bear lesson with Jan Schoonover is now available

The second lesson in the Sculptured Leather Art Lesson series with Jan Schoonover is now available on the Badlands Leather Art website.  This lesson includes 40 pages of detailed instructions and  140 color photographs on  carving, hairing, embossing and coloring  the  black bear.  

We are now accepting checks or money orders as optional payment methods for those of you that don't care to use Pay Pal. We are also offering the lesson on  DVD for people who would rather not have to download it. This should be helpful for people still using a dial up internet connection. The will be an additional $5 charge to get the lesson on DVD to cover additional costs including packaging and shipping.

I'd really like to get feedback on these lessons so that I can make future lessons as useful as possible. Let me know what you think! The next lesson in the series will be a brown trout. I'll head back to Billings in the next couple weeks to get started on it. I am planning on having it ready by the end of September.

Cleaning some things off my bench

I've usually got several different things started on my carving bench at one time, and sometimes a couple  in the refrigerator too. This weekend  I decided to see if I could finish up a few things. The first was a cell phone case that my son wanted. We started on this  last weekend. He wanted a phone case that would protect his phone at his new job. He's always got ideas of what he wants and what he doesn't want so it took us some brain storming to get his ideas into something we could actually build. This case gives the phone two layers of leather covering both the front and back of the phone. He didn't want a snap closure so we went through several ideas before coming up with kind of a slot and tab closure. This thing was not a lot of fun to sew up! The case should last a lot longer than most of his phones do.

The next project was to paint the bear from the last lesson with Jan. Jan said this one was quick and easy to paint. I had my doubts, but he was right. I like it a lot better than the first black bear I did with him. I may have to repaint that one too.
(I've tried and tried but I can't get a decent picture of this bear!)








And finally, I decided to finish up the antelope picture. I added some tall grass in the foreground, and did the backgrounding on the picture. I think they are both ready for frames now.

New tools for an old pattern

In an older post, I showed some patterns off of an old saddle I am hoping to replicate. I mentioned that I didn't have some of the tools needed to stamp these patterns. A couple of my friends stepped up and offered to try and make some tools for me. I have some pretty neat friends!! Last Friday I received a package in the mail from Clay Miller, aka Bert. In it were three meander stamps that he had made. Clay acquired the tools that Billy Wooters used when he was making tools. When I asked Bert what I owed him, he told me "they are the first stamps I have ever made so if I become famous they could be priceless LOL..on the other hand if I make lots of them and no one buys them they will be worthless...LOL".  


Judging by Bert's carving, and how he ran the Tandy store in Rapid City, I would bet on him making darn nice tools and I'm proud to have the first ones.  Thanks Bert!!



Here's a practice piece I stamped up to see how they compared to the pattern on the old saddle. I like the look and I'm getting pretty excited to get started on this saddle. If there were only more days in the week!

Black bear lesson will be available soon

I finished  up writing the lesson on the black bear this weekend and mailed a copy of it to Jan today. If he doesn't find anything  major that needs to be changed, the lesson should be available by the end of this week or early next week. I received some pretty good feedback from the people that purchased the first lesson and I really appreciate it. I also got some suggestions on what people would like to see changed or added to future lessons. The second  lesson will include large pictures of what the project should look like at the end of each section. We really want these lessons to be as complete and easy to follow as possible so that anyone who purchases them will be able to follow them and end up with a project they are happy with. As soon as Jan gives me the okay, I'll get this one up on the website.

Figuring out tooling patterns

Every once in a while, I drag out parts of the old saddle I intend to try and replicate and try and figure out how the tooling on it was done. This saddle is probably around 80 years old or more, so the tooling on it is quite different than most modern day saddles. This weekend I was working on the skirts. The leather was old and dried up and the patterns were fairly hard to make out. I cleaned the parts up with lots of water and an old toothbrush (Jake was kind of worried it was his).  Once most of the dirt and grime was off of them, I set them on a towel on the cement floor. I placed a heavy board over them and set severl 5 gallon containers of water on top of the board. Once they dried, they are fairly flat again. Then I applied a heavy coat of Skidmore's Leather Dressing on the parts to keep them pliable. Once they were flat and dry, the tooling patterns are a little easier to see. The top picture shows the border design around a lot of the saddle. I'm going to have to try and find a meander stamp similar to the one used here. I don't have anything like it. The second picture shows a flower design that was tooled into the center of the basket weave on the skirts. I think I've figured out how he did that.

The first step was to draw a circle with a pair of dividers. I then reset the divider and made another circle about 1/8 inch larger around the first circle. Next  I used a small veiner and make a border inside the circle. The points where the veiner impressions come together are used as spacers for the next step. 

A smooth veiner was used to create the flower petals. One tip of the veiner is set in the center of the other veiner impressions, the other tip of the veiner was aimed towards the center point of the flower. I went around the flower making each of the right side impressions first.

Then go back and make the left side impressions.

A stop tool was used where the impressions come together at the bottom.

A pear shader was used to give some depth to the petals and a flower center was stamped in the  middle.

To finish it off, a border stamp was used around the outside of the border.

While I was working on the first pattern,  I had an idea for a second flower. It might be fun to play with this and see how many other variations could be done.