Burning into Leather

I received a wood burner for my birthday a few months ago and I've been putting it to good use. I just finished making a journal for myself with a really neat burned in spine. I'll make another post about that next week. This photo below shows the woodburner. It's a Colwood "CUB" and works wonderfully.

I'll give you a preview of some of the things I've done with it.

This book has a skeleton key with an ivy type plant burned in around the border. I really just had fun the other night making this one. This book is also for sale in my shop right now.

This photograph below shows a date that I burned into the leather strap. Two identical books were made and the date was the wedding anniversary of the couple that received the books.

These were made for two brothers who love to draw and their mother said that one of her sons was very picky about the paper he used in his sketchbooks so we put in Rives BFK. I hope he enjoys using that :)

This was a recent order. I antiqued the moose onto the journal cover and then burned in the name on the lower right corner.

This is one my dad (Rett Ashby) did and we sold it in my ETSY shop. The sketch was done on a darker leather. It's best seen by enlarging the photo by clicking on it.

This one below was also a custom order. I burned the children's faces onto the leather from photographs. The book actually wasn't stitched yet when this photo was taken but it was a long stitch with the exposed thread on the spine and the faces were on the wrap around part of the cover.

This was a custom order in which I burned in "David's Genius Ideas."

I've tried burning into sealed leather and it sort of carves away the leather instead of leaving a burned mark. None of the leathers above were sealed but the last photo of David's Genius Ideas shows a leather that was coated and it was also an oil tanned leather, so it left a lighter area around the burned letters where the sealant was heated or melted away. You can see that the burning really shows up on lighter leathers well like the chrome tanned one of the kids faces.

I've recently found some vegetable tanned lambskin though (some is available in my shop) and I'm excited because it burns really well and it is not sealed so I can antique it and get different looks from it. I'm really excited to be able to use it on cord bound books and get an old book look.

Hopefully I'll have some done in about a week to show you.

Thanks Dad and Mom for the fun Birthday Present!