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.

Latest addition to my leather art collection

Over the last several years I’ve been building a collection of leather art from  artist's whose work I admire. The latest addition to my collection is a piece from Paul Burnett. I’ve been a fan of Paul’s work for a long time. Paul is an amazing artist and teacher. He was the first recipient of the Al Stohlman award. You can see more of Paul’s work at the gallery section of his Painting Cow website. Paul does such a variety of different things with leather it’s hard to choose a favorite, but  his eagle head might have to be my choice. The lessons Paul writes are some of the best instructional material you will find anywhere. On his website,  you can sign up for his free lessons  or order his detailed home study courses,  publications, and kits. There is also a gift shop where you can purchase a variety of feather jewelry carved out of leather and colored to look real.

The  piece that Paul created for me was based on a painting by Tom Beecham that was featured on a past  cover of an Outdoor Life magazine. Paul carved and colored it with his usual amazing attention to detail. It’s a great piece of art and I am proud to have a piece of his work to add to my collection. THANKS Paul!

Some more new tools

Earlier this year I posted some pictures of the tooling on an old saddle that belonged to my great grandfather. I am planning on making a saddle similar to this one sometime (I really thought I'd have it started by now). When I mentioned that I would need some new tools to recreate the tooling designs, a couple of my friends offered to help me out.  I showed pictures of the tools that Clay Miller sent to me in an earlier post.  Another friend, Carl Breidenich said he would also like to see if he could make me the tools I needed. I met  Carl on the internet a few years ago and we've helped each other fill in some missing spots in our Craftool collections. Carl also modifies tools to make new designs out of old tools. That's what he did for me. He took a couple Craftool stamping tools and changed the faces of the tools completely. The tools he made work really well. Thanks to my good friends, I've now got the tools I need to tool the designs on my saddle  project. All I need now is some time!

Swivel knife holster

Kathy Flanagan is a master leather artist and teacher from Conifer, Colorado. She has written several articles for the Leather Crafters and Saddlers Journal most recently a mini series on how to carve horses. She has taught classes at the Sheridan and Wickenburg shows. She has also taught at many of the IFoLG shows, Tandy stores, and does numerous classes around Colorado. This fall at the federation show in St Louis, Kathy will be teaching a class on how to make a swivel knife holster. When I was in Rapid City with Kathy last month, she gave me one of these holsters that she is making and it's the coolest thing! The carving is great, the coloring is great, it even has my initials on it. Thanks Kathy for the great gift! Anyone heading to the St Louis show should consider taking Kathy's class. She's a great teacher and a fun person to hang out with.

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.