Getting Crafty

I was going to write about how my daughter T., Kat, and I went to this really cool combination coffee house and ceramics studio and got all artsy-craftsy earlier today, but I ended up leaving the house without a thought of grabbing our camera, so that post will have to wait until our artwork is ready to pick up in about a week.

Instead, I'm going to tell you about Shane and Kat doing some leather crafting last weekend during the snow storm.

Shane is pretty good at leather-crafting, as you can see in this post from my old blog.  A while back -- maybe a year or so ago -- Kat became interested, so they started a project together.  It's a craft that can take years to perfect, but is actually quite simple to learn in basic form and is suitable for crafters of all ages.

Kat's first project was a tooled tri-fold key wallet.  As so often happens, projects get set aside around here, but they finally picked it back up and finished it last weekend.  Here she and Shane are using a device called a stitching pony to hold the key wallet steady while they stitched the binding.

Here is the interior of the finished wallet...

And here is the exterior.  I don't use her real name on the blog, so it has been electronically erased from the center area there.

Her next project is going to be a belt, with a daffodil pattern. Here she is doing a practice pattern for it on a piece of scrap leather.

I can hardly wait to see how it turns out!