Day One in Paradise

So, here we are.  I am now a person who sort of knows what happens in a finishing class! Or at least the first day of one.  Most of the day was spent making 'plaquettes,' which is a sort of dumb sounding name for a board that you cover with leather and line with decorative paper and basically pretend like is the cover of a book.  We made one in goat, calf, and pig skin so that we see how the different leathers handle tooling and such before we do it for reals on our books.  So, as I said, almost all day was just sanding the boards and paring leather and covering and in filling and lining, but THEN at the very end when all that was finished, we started doing actual tooling!  I JUST realized that it was dumb of me to not take a picture of the tooling set up.  I think I am not even going to try explaining it, we will save that for tomorrow because really without pics it kind of is lame.  But anyway here are some pictures of my plaquettes, with and without tooling:

 

Woo hoo, right??  You should be very impressed by that single gold border line, it is a VERY big deal.  Actually the great thing is that it turns out that it is not very hard to do a simple line like that, so that is um lucky.  We only started doing the tooling in literally the last hour of the day, so tomorrow I hope we will do lots of new cool things and there will be more impressive things to show off.

This is a picture of my lunch break, it was AWESOME:

 Did you notice the duck in the background?  Seriously, I am living the life. 

 Last time I walked though this part and took a picture of this pond it was frozen solid.  I am realizing that I have never really been here before when the weather was this AWESOME. I mean, the rain and snow times are fun and dramatic too, but it is reaaaaally nice to have it be like 75 degrees and sunny, and to be able to walk in the park and actually sit and have lunch on the benches instead of having them be covered in a foot of snow.