Cool dying thing that happened

[PrattBard]

I just had to share this!! I'm working on a bookbag at the moment. I did very little tooling on it, as I wanted the trimming to stand out more than anything else (less is more).

I did carve my initials in it, and then frame it with a seeder. Well upon dying I found the dye sucked into the tooling part more than the rest of the piece. It is now a shade or two darker than the rest. I thought it would fade out when it dried. BUT it didn't, and looks absoutly AWESOME!! LOL it looks like I painstakenly dyed every dot and initial with a tiny brush to get the effect! LOL I'm sooo thrilled. I just put the sealer coat on and am going to Hi-Liter this afternoon.

Has anyone else had this happened? I probly couldn't do this again if I tried, but I'm soo thrill it worked out this way, it looks great so far. (now only if I can say that once it is assembled I'm home free! LOL)

Lara

[Chuck Burrows]

Sound nice Lara. Lets see a pic when you get done.

THat's what the wonderful thing about leather work - nothing comes out the same way twice and these sort of "magical" things happen all the time.

It is fairly commom though to have tooled leather absorb the dye more than the surrounding undisturbed leather. Still it really isn't anything you can really "control" (well you can usea resist, but in general...) so it is wonderful what can just happen.

My Old West leather gear is all "aged" and it's difficult to explain to the layman that I can't necessarily make a piece look exactly like another since sometimes I'm not sure what I did to get the original effect!

[PrattBard]

Yeah my bag is kinda large, and since I'm not setup for dip dying I desided to fix my orginal streaks with a blotch pattern. Got rather nice, makes it look old and used, darker in some areas than others. I like it. Can't wait to get it all together!! I'm putting a sealer coat on the inside tonight then I can start assembly of it. Should be interesting. I'll take a pic when I'm done.