The starting point here is a holiday maker gift swap, the Fools with Tools Treasure Trade. The recipient turns out to be a devoted Edgar Allan Poe reader, so the maker built around The Raven and tooled a carved raven onto a leather cover for pocket notebooks, sized for standard pocket formats including Field Notes and Moleskine Cahier.
The construction follows a solid hand-tooling path in 5-6 oz vegetable-tanned leather. A raven illustration traced onto translucent paper was transferred to dampened leather, then cut in with a swivel knife. The carving was painted with black dye first, then picked out with grey and white leather paints, and the finished front shows a black raven with black and white feather work perched on a stone or branch. Suede inner flaps were saddle stitched on with braided waxed thread, grey in this case, and the cover has rounded corners with perimeter stitching.
The personal touches stand out. The recipient's signature logo was embossed using a 3D printed PLA stamp printed at 100% infill with 0.075 inches of letter relief, pressed in with wood blocks and screw clamps, and the back cover carries a debossed hand logo stamp. Finishing was patient: neatsfoot oil left to soak for 4 hours, two coats of carnauba creme, then edges dyed and burnished with gum tragacanth, beeswax and a wooden slicker before the cover was pressed beneath stacked books wrapped around a notebook.
One honest limit the maker flags is that printed stamp resolution is bounded by nozzle size, so very fine lettering may be the ceiling. Even so, plain PLA stamps at full infill sound like a genuinely useful addition to a leather bench, and the whole gift reads as a thoughtful, well-executed piece.
Project by Morley Kert. Watch it on their YouTube channel: