!De Colores!

I love natural oiled and aged leather. It is one of the most beautiful things, and good leather is one of the few materials that improve with age. As a result, I’ve often been hesitant to use dye. In a recent post, I wrote about a trip to Florence, where I saw some lovely leather goods, and they often had bold and wonderful colors.

This is the season of boxes, and here are a few more that I’ve recently finished. They are all completely hand made, with a lot of rubbing and finishing to get the deep color. I’ve really had fun making them!

I also have been enjoying the “Sol LeWitt” inspired designs. The light colored box shown below is a continuous spiral that was cut with a swivel knife without any guides. It is sometimes hard to find a close connection between leatherwork and my day job as a scientist, but the spiral does play an important role in my science. With my very skilled collaborators, we use spiral structures of superconducting material called “YBCO” deposited onto sapphire pieces to make coils for nuclear magnetic resonance (similar to MRI). We use the same sort of pattern (just done without the wavy lines) for these coils as this box.