Here’s the review (albeit a very late one) on another pretty fantastic class with one of my favorite buddies, Tony. This class was for making masks, which are worn just about everywhere down here from Guavaween to Gasparilla to Night Clubs. Heck, I’m even thinking about hosting a party where wearing a mask is required! They’re just that much fun and creative.
Everyone in class was given the same design and Tony highlighted a couple tips & tricks for cutting the pattern out of the leather. There were different tools for us to try out and use and there were quite a few folks in the class that got wonderfully creative with the actual cutting. I love it when folks color outside the lines!
It was a great class and I’m extremely disappointed in the piece I ended up with. It was quite a bit harder than I expected. Leather is one of the few materials that has a memory. Anything you do to it while it’s wet, stays. Almost like the leather “remembers” the shape you put it in. So we all drowned our leather cut outs for a few minutes and then formed them around Styrofoam heads (the kind you’d find in a beauty shop) to get the leather shaped around the eyes and nose. I decided to give mine a more customized feel by molding it to my actual face (MY nose and MY cheekbones, etc). As the wet leather dries, it shrinks just a tiny bit and becomes quite rigid. All of this I knew, but didn’t think about as I was pressing the cool leather against my face. It felt so great! But once it all dried, it felt like it was going to cut my face off. That’s also partially because I didn’t bevel the edges. Again, lesson learned!
It was easy enough to fix since I didn’t seal both sides. I just re-wet the leather and reformed. The next step was to punch the holes and insert the strings to tie the mask and keep in place. But how many of us ladies out there are going to wear a mask like this without a fantastic do’? And if you HAVE a fantastic do’, are you really going to tie a couple leather strings behind your head that will mat down your hair? I didn’t think so. So my fix was to weight the strings with some beads, cut them a little shorter and add some feather accents. To wear this mask, all you have to do is wrap the leather behind your ear and voila! The weights on the end of the strings keep the mask in place and keep the do’ safe and mat-free!
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