On Saturday 13th February 2016 I went to the Tandy Leather Factory in Northampton for a morning of learning how to carve leather. This has long been tricky for me and I came away feeling much more confident. The store manager Roy took us through creating a round leather carving. This included using a swivel knife, bevelling and tooling. I had tried this at home but felt unimpressed with my efforts, though now I could see where I was going wrong - over saturation of the leather, wrong angle of the swivel knife and not cutting deep enough were just a few errors. I would thoroughly recommend this course to anyone wanting to learn how to carve.

This is a montage of my carving journey. The round carving and the rose carving (bottom right) are my two recent creations. I am proud of these two and also proud that I can see I have made progress. I have made every mistake possible to make - the dog collar is an example of this, but now I feel I know where I am likely to go wrong. This is an amazing art form and the internet is full of fabulous examples.

Before Christmas I was privileged to be asked by Lyndon Design to make some key rings for their promotional activities. Nick at Artisan Stamps created the stamp and the leather is black stevedore from AA Crack in Northampton. 300 key rings created!

What a treat to be making baby mocs with Rose Choules at her workshop in Bude. This was one of her one day courses and she is a great teacher. I made the pair below. We used shearling which is lush and rather soft to work with. It makes fabulous baby mocs. I think we might put a few pairs out for Bucks Open Studios 2016.

I received a pyrography tool as a wedding anniversary present and enjoyed playing about with it. I realised that I needed to learn more about this art form so started looking about for a course. I found one with Bob Neill at the Buckingham Summer School and thought it looked, so I signed up. This is a great art form and so much more refined than my initial experiments. This is a great day and Bob and Del were very patient teachers, helping me refine my clumsy technique. This is something that I would like to try on leather and play about with some effects. Some of my days work is below.