Experimenting with the leather...

I brought a variety of different types of leather from Bachelors and Alma Leathers in London.  They are mostly hard vegetable tanned leather, but there are some softer thinner pieces as well.

Here are some pictures showing what I have been doing with the leather....

I used different types of plaster to try and capture the texture of the leather.   I firstly used modelling clay which did not work very well because it couldn't capture the fine detail of the leather's surface. 

Using latex directly onto the leather then waiting for it to dry then  I poured moulding plaster with water  over the latex samples and it captured the texture perfectly giving the fine detail i was looking for.  The latex pieces can also be used to record the pattern and details onto paper by brushing ink onto the surface and pressing down.

This is the more effective experiment using moulding powder (plaster casting)

I then started looking at ways of manipulating the colour of the leather using dye methods and bleach.

I used melted wax  (batik) on the leather to act as a resit to the die, this works very well and allows to build up layers of colour intensity by repeatign the method.

These are some of the bleaching experiments where I poured the bleach directly onto the surface.  They produced some interesting results, where it made the light vegetable tan leather darker.

After that I soaked the pieces in water and bleach and found it didn't effectively remove the colour but started to erode the surface causing some discolouration.

Other experiments that I did which are shown in my sketchbook are different ways of burning the leather such as baking, grilling, toasting and frying.  Although they produced interesting effects I don't thing they would be practical for my experiment because it makes the material weaker and have a unpleasant smell so would not be appropriate for using for jewellery.

One process I would like to explore further is boiling the leather I boiled pieces of leather for 1,5, 10, 20 and 30 mins and the longer it was boiled for the more stretchy and spongy it was and I did not expect this. I think it would be interesting to maybe try boiling and then stretching.  On the other hand when the leather dried after boiling it became very brittle and hard not able to be manipulated in anyway.

Bleaching the leather for me was unsuccessful the colour did not change; just a little lighter, the surface became rougher and a strong smell was left behind.  I would rather try and find a lighter type of leather than bleaching it as the results and colour change is unreliable and unpredictable.