Hi Everyone! Today is a really quick post/video with another idea for embossing leather. If you haven’t read my initial post in this leather series, please make sure do do that because I cover a lot of the basics here.
I have experimented with polymer clay for leather embossing, and polymer plates for leather embossing. This particular day, I had a plate I made in which the design was indented in. If I used that plate to emboss leather, the design in the leather would emboss out. However, in this case I wanted the design
to deboss into the leather. I could have just made another polymer plate with the design inversed, but I was in the process of playing with polymer clay, so I decided to just press the existing plate into a strip of clay and bake it to make a polymer clay plate that was the inverse of the original. Polymer clay embosses as nicely as the polymer plates, and clay is much cheaper and easier to deal with so I went with that.
Note that I imprinted the polymer clay a couple of times, and didn’t spend a lot of time trying to line up the flower images. I would certainly do that if I were to use this technique again. In my case I actually remade the plate into a longer strip to avoid having to camouflage an mis-aligned image.
The leather I used in this post is a white wax coated leather that you can find at Rocky Mountain Leather https://www.rmleathersupply.com/products/conceria-walpier-ghost-buttero-burro-veg-tanned-leather-many-colors?variant=15522403352685 . It’s lovely, comes in a few colors and embosses nicely. It does scratch easily, taking the white coating off so you have to handle it with a little care.
This idea can be expanded to use anything that can be pressed into clay- items, stamps, die cuts (see my ideas on that here and here) etc. Just remember the design will be inversed. Then you can also use the same idea of inversing cured polymer clay as I did with silicone putty in this post, but instead of using vaseline as the release agent, just use corn starch.
You can get really creative with the polymer clay and I just think it embosses so nicely. It will be one of my go to things to use going forward.
Enjoy!
