Quonset Hut Album with Multiple Leather Inlays & Clamshell Box with Recessed Piece of Corrugated Steel Roofing
This album holds the record for the project I have worked on the longest. This project took about a year and a half to complete (I'm not kidding!). It helped that the client was not in a huge hurry! But there were so many steps to this project, it just necessitated spending a great deal of time on it. The album is 10" square with 50 pages. The customer sent me a photo of their quonset hut home in Michigan. They really liked the angle of the photo and wanted me to reproduce that on the cover of the book. They were working on rennovating this house and wanted a photo album to keep a record of the process. This cover is mainly navy pigskin leather. The front of the house is made up no fewer than 20 pieces that were separately covered in various types and colors of leather and then assembled like a puzzle into recessed area on the cover. Each strip of siding on the upper portion of the house was cut by hand individually and assembled, overlapping like real siding, before being covered by thin, hand-pared light blue goatskin leather. The lower portion of the house was created with white kangaroo leather stamped in tan with a brick pattern (a custom die was made for stamping this pattern). Windows, windowsills, more areas of siding, and a small porch roof were added using various colors and types of leather wrapped around raised cut out shapes. There is a raised frame around the image that is silver-leafed and sealed with silver leaf sealer. A crescent moon is hot foil stamped in silver with 3 different sizes of stars stamped in silver, chrome, and pewter. Each star was added one at a time. The stars spill out of the frame and onto the spine around the word "Quonset" also stamped in silver (though it is not pictured below, a few stars also spilled onto the back cover of the book). The roof line and chimney were also accented with silver leaf and sealed. Of course this book needed to have a protective clamshell box. The box is made of navy blue vellum bookcloth stamped with light blue stamping foil. The customer sent me a good-sized jagged piece of the actual corrugated steel roofing. I had a good friend and metalworker cut it into an even, smooth-edged square for me and that square of roofing was permanently mounted into a deep shadowbox-style recess on the cover of the box. Needless to say, figuring out the measurements and the geometry of that deeply recessed square on the front of the box (so that it could not be seen from inside the box) was tricky, so I called in reinforcements and got advice from my boss Chris (much appreciated!). This project required an insane amount of time, but the results matched the photo of the original building as closely as possible for an image done entirely in leather!
It is very hard for me to put a price on a project like this one. But if I am ever asked again to do an image of a home in raised leather, I would have to charge AT LEAST $1,000 for a book and box set similar to this one in detail. And of course, my customer would have to have plenty of time available for me to complete the order.
