Fish Ledger

The Fish Ledger, as I call it, was a project that I started a while back for a friend of mine whose nickname is...Fish.

Well, the idea of a yin-yang with Fish came to mind since it combined two of his "themes" and I drew it up. Unfortunately I had no idea what to do with the design until I started wood-burning leather.

That's where I started with this project.

I had a ledger-sized book-blank ready to go and some time on my hands and started to lay it out on the cover of some nice oak-tanned leather and then tried my hand with the burner.

The result was very nice. It was supposed to be a light fish on one side and a dark one on the other. Easy to design but not so easy to burn that way without messing it up.

The leather, since it's brand new, needed something to give it some character so I tried the burned-leather look that I did on a previous project (click here) and scorched it here and there.

This broke up the pale tan leather and the burned fish image very well and gave me a good start before I started to add the finish.

The first layer of dye gave the leather a nice, earthy look but the color was blotchy here and there so I decided to give it a second coat and a layer of leather protectant to seal in the color and preserve it against water damage.

Since this is a ledger book (7" x 11") I needed to add some kind of closure to hold the whole thing together. I thought that the leather ties at the top and bottom would be a great element and punched holes to run the leather lace.

Here's the finished image of the book. You can see that after I buffed the leather it's taken on a nice shine that will, unfortunately, dull with age but by then the book will have developed its own character.

I'm very pleased with it.