Are you in the market to start a new craft? Are you an artist, crafter, or maybe both? Well, maybe Letter stamping will be the new craft for you. This craft can be very versatile, you can use it for gift-giving, decorating or just personal use, whatever you need it to be.
Leather Stamping is simply using a tool to stamp textured or decorative stamps into leather pieces. You can create many items with this crafting. Anything from simple Keychains to decorative wall pieces. You can let your creativity soar with how much variety is available.
Tools to Get Started
So to start this craft you will obviously need to get many of the basic tools to start. What’s really great is that many kits can be found all over the internet from many craft sites as well as Amazon or Etsy. Here’s just a basic list that will get you started and you can always grow from there.
- Leather Stamping Kit (Kit features basic starting items for this craft)
- Leather for stamping
- Leather stain/dye
- Acrylic Paint Pens
- Sealer
- Misc stamps
- Leather Stamping How-to Book
The rundown on what you need
So let’s start off with the Leather Stamping How-to books. You want to get started in this new craft and with that, you need to kind of read up on the basics that you would need to get started. These books help give you the beginning basics as well as pointers on how to maximize that creativity in you. They offer techniques as well as step-by-step instructions on how to make cute and great-looking leather crafts. If you don’t want to spend money on the books you can always head on over to YouTube. There you will find many videos on what you need as a beginner and what crafts are great to start with. All these will definitely help you become confident in your crafting skills, and always remember that practice makes perfect.
Now let’s go over the Leather Stamping kit and what basics you want to make sure it has so that you have the essentials. With this kit, you want to make sure it comes with a hammer, a cutting/stamping mat, texture stamps. These basic tools will let you get started on stamping. The rest of the items that are in the kit will be great additions once you start feeling comfortable and exploring the craft more. Now as these are starter kits you’ll come to find out what works and what doesn’t. What’s really nice is that if you don’t want to buy the whole kits you could buy piece by piece, but sometimes that can come out to cost a bit more. The kits though, do help you be prepared for future crafts that take a bit more skill and once you get to that point you will be ready to advance more.
Once you have the basic stamping tools you are probably going to want to expand your stamping collection. You can add all types of stamps from different font lettering to seasonal stamps as well. It’s always nice to have a variety of fonts to use so that way you can change up the looks of your crafts in that simple yet creative way. If you have trouble finding what you’re looking for in leather stamps you can always look into metal stamps as they tend to work just as well on the softer material. By leaving yourself open to these as well you’ll be able to add more creativity to your projects and offer one-of-a-kind designs as well.
When looking at Leather to stamp and craft on, it just depends on what you would like to work on. If you head to Etsy you can find Leather Blanks, which are just leather already cut out into your ideal size and shape you would like to work with, there are also a few available if you search on Amazon as well. If you would like to start on a bunch of different items you can find leather kits with various leather projects also. So finding leather to work on isn’t that hard which is really nice.
Now once you have your leather, you probably will want to add some color to your project. The simplest way to do this is with a leather dye/stain. These come in various colors and all you have to do is choose which one would fit your project. Stains are a fun way to add flair to your leather project, you can go for the normal leather colors of mahogany and brown or you can even add fun colors like blue, purple, or green. You can often find stain packs that will give you a variety of stains to test for yourself. Now along with these stains, you can also use acrylic paint pens to detail your piece and give it even more life. The acrylic paint sits well on the leather and your piece will just pop.
Once your project is done you will want to seal it so that your project will remain vibrant for as long as possible. You can use a variety of acrylic sealers from brands like Tandy Leather and other leather-specific brands. You can also use spray acrylic sealers as well, they are pretty good at sealing the stain and the leather and all the detail from acrylic paint as well. Some do take a bit to dry, while some can be sealed in minutes. You probably should have a blow dryer or heat gone on hand to help speed up the process.
This was just a basic list of items and things you would need, obviously you will end up adding more or less depending on your creativity. This should help lead you in the right direction to start leather stamping and to get the basics down as well. The versatility of leather stamping is great. You’ll have so much fun from making belts to keychains and even earrings. Have fun crafting!
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