The Atheist Witch

Thursday, June 8, 2017

Adventures in Leather-tooling: episode 1

Well...I really suck at this! I know practice makes perfect but "patience" isn't one of my strongest virtues. Procrastination, however, I'm very good at. So instead of getting a start on today's practicing (I'll get to that in a moment), I have lit some "inspiration" incense (Shoyeido Magnifiscents Angelic series) and am going to talk about that for a little while.

I'm not paid to promote anything but since it's taken me a long time to find incense I enjoy, I thought I'd share my opinion on it. Shoyeido is my favorite brand of incense. I love Amethyst, which is part of their Jewel line, and I burn it almost daily. It's not too overpowering and the sticks are short with probably a 10 minute burn time. When I light incense, I don't want it to burn for long. The scent tends to become a bit overpowering for me if the burn time isn't relatively short. I have Amethyst (Balance) which is actually my favorite of the whole brand, Diamond (Power), and Ruby (Strength) from the Jewel collection, as well as Inspiration and Peace from the Angelic collection. I also have Golden Pavilion which smells pretty good, too, but I haven't used that one yet. I do suggest picking up the Shoyeido Incense Sampler before buying any of them because there might be some in there that you like that I didn't, or vice versa. The sampler that I have has one stick of each from all of the Angelic collection and the Jewel collection. I've never bought online because I have a few stores in my area that carry them. Check out holistic shops, occult shops, and even Whole Foods or World Market if you don't want to buy online. I know they're also sold on Amazon so if you have Prime, you could get free shipping through Amazon and pay basically what I do at the shop I go to.

I've just started perusing the Shoyeido site and I might have to try the incense coils when I do rituals/celebrations. Incense for the "air" designation during ritual needs to burn a little longer than 10 minutes ;).

So yeah, clearly I'm great at procrastinating!

Today's goal is to take a piece of veg-tanned scrap leather and work on hammering depth and making smooth marks. I have a tendency to "jump" my stamp so the lines and shading are not at all smooth. I'm going to work on straight rows and curved designs, and probably work some more with the swivel knife, since that hasn't been going very smoothly either. Yay. Well, hopefully I'll get a hang of this soon as the costume pieces I am going to be working on pretty much need to be done by the beginning of August! Wish me luck.

Thursday, June 1, 2017

Supernatural ss 12 and leather tooling

Watching Supernatural ss 12 (episode 11, in case anyone is wondering. It's an interesting ep. so far) on Netflix and trying to figure out how to go about properly learning how to tool and carve leather. So far, my general tactic of "learn as you experiment" really hasn't been going that well. I'm not a huge fan of the whole Western-style patterns but that seems to be the most popular pattern out there. I primarily do renaissance and steampunk costumes. The Western theme really isn't much of my thing so I've kind of been skirting around it. Well, that hasn't been going well for me so I'm putting aside my way for awhile. Eventually I'll be making pieces with Viking/Scandy/Celtic knotwork.

I'm thinking I'll start out pretty simple. Flowers, feathers, and leaves look like a good place to start!

Some resources for free patterns:

http://elktracks.net/free-patterns.html (Western-style)

http://imgarcade.com/celtic-leather-carving-patterns.html (Celtic knotwork) A warning for this link: apparently they're either spammers or have been hacked by them. You can still get to the stencils but it pops up stupid ads for adult content. So...go at your own risk, I guess. Definitely make sure your computer is computerSTD protected first, and don't click on anything that's not directly related to the content you're there for, obviously.