Surprise - Canton Herald's Binder (with pictures)

Months ago, Nathaniel talked to me about possibly doing some sort of leather herald's binder cover. It's been on my to-do list for a while, but I've been busy working on my QPT project so it kind-of got shelved for a while. I had worked out the carving pattern for the tower at Baron's Howe, but I hadn't really done anything else.

This weekend, while Avelyn was raiding the Black Friday hoards, I was going to do some more work on my leather dyes but decided I should try to get this done instead.

I presented it to the Canton at our meeting/Canton Christmas party on Sunday as a Christmas gift. Yay!

Here's what I did:

First, I had to carve the tower applique piece. I worked on that over the course of the past week and got it ready to go for the weekend. For the dyes, I used a brighter yellow (rather than the mustard yellow I used before), and mixed my own shade of blue to brighten it up a bit since the stuff out of the bottle was so dark. I was pretty happy with the results.

 

Next, I had to get the binder piece done. I decided to use my period dye for this part, so used what was left of my vinegar black. It's such a big piece of leather I had to use every drop I had, and it still wasn't quite as dark as I would like, but it's still pretty good.

So on Saturday, it was a matter of assembling the pieces. I stitched the tower applique on, then used my rubber cement to stick the big leather piece onto the binder. I had originally planned to roll all of the edges over but that didn't work so I just stitched across the top and bottom to fix the piece onto the binder. I trimmed the edges a bit, and voila - she's done.