Hi everyone! In this new experiment with leather, I thought I had this great idea for a stencil design. It was supposed to be flowers with circles in the centers. But I always forget this when I’m doing stencils- images that are in the middle of another design need to be attached to the outside edges of those designs. Otherwise, when you pop the pieces out on a stencil, those inside things just disappear! They’re not attached to anything.
You should check out my introductory post if you haven’t already. It’s long, but I talk about how to prepare the leather as well as other tips and warnings for using your die cut machines with leather. These machines can be broken if you don’t know what you are doing so please be careful!
In this case, I reworked the design so there were braces or supports- basically lines that connect the centers to the outside flowers. Now that might be ok when you are blobbing paint or ink through the stencils because there’s a likelihood that the lines will disappear especially if they are super thin. However, in this case the lines would imprint on the leather which is not what I wanted. I wanted an open flower with just a single circle/dot in the middle.
Here’s a picture of the design with the braces:
So I started thinking what if I go back to my original and maybe I emboss in two steps- emboss the centers and then the flowers or vice versa. In the end I decided to layer two different cutouts- one of the flowers and one of the centers- and then tried to impress both into leather at the same time. These were multi layer stencils.
Here’s a picture of the experiment’s stencil layers:
I decided to put the flower side down first and then the dots. I placed the embossing rubber on my Sizzix platform with one tab down, and then the leather with the cardstock stencil sandwich and then my mat with shims. These are only as needed, and as many as it takes to feel some pressure while rolling everything through, but not enough to make it super hard. Also, the leather was wet as I describe in my first post on embossing leather.
Here is the results of the layered stencils embossed onto leather:
Note that if I was doing this for real, I would have glued the stencils of the flowers and the circles together, and I would have taped the sandwich and leather so the design/stencil wouldn’t shift. You’ll see a test case at the end where I used this same sandwich on a different piece of test leather, and the leather moved underneath. And then I show how I fixed it. I used leather stamps (cheap set from Amazon) to add designs around the impressed leather.
Here is the results of the fixed leather after staining:
I really liked the way this bob-boo turned out! I may try to do this on purpose 😉 .
I decided to also try out one thickness of the flower cutouts with one thickness of the dots. It worked although I need to work on lining up my centers in the flowers a little bit better 😉 .
Enjoy!
