leather tablet holders: how to by Mon Cheri

Happy Columbus Day!

For a change of pace, Mon Cheri has the day off, so he's making a post.

Take it away...

Morgane went on the Haloween Hunt on October 5th and met the Graphics Fairy in real life and explained that I used some graphics for a project, so I'd like to show off the result.

I made two leather tablet holders as gifts:

and,

I made them using the same technique we used to transfer an image on wood to make trays and crates, ironing on the image from shelf paper.

I put together images from the Graphics Fairy, printed them on the contact paper, then ironed onto two brass plates.  This is what the plates looked like before I ironed on the images; 

The brass plates were cut from a door kickplate using a hacksaw.  The images were formatted in Open Office.  The only tricky part is the lettering, you have to convert the text to an image and then transform it to the mirror image before transferring it to the contact paper.  If you don't perform this transformation, the writing comes out backwards.

  

A careful examination of the world map shows it is backwards in the picture for this reason.

As for the rest of the project, Morgane made the fabric liner.  I cut the leather, tooled it, dyed it, and sewed it all together by hand.  I acquired all the tools, leather, and dye from Tandy leather company.  I used a 4-5 ounce leather cowhide and water based dyes.  I made up my own decorative design for the cover flaps and cut it with an exacto knife, then pounded the image into the leather using metal stamps.

The Graphics Fairy is a great resource to add customization to projects like this.  Thanks Graphics Fairy! 

Thank you Mon Cheri for sharing your art work,

they turned out really well!

Happy day!