Seriously, leather stencils are a game changer.

For some time, I’ve been looking for ways to decorate my leather journals. I wanted to move beyond making simple leather journals, to books that would stand out and have something unique and artsy about them 🙂

For a while, I relied upon using patterns in reclaimed leather, to adorn my books. For example, I would use the seam of a leather jacket, as the spine of my journal. This was fine, but still limited my options. See two examples below –

Enter leather stencils. Leather stencils allow you to cut all kinds of shapes into your leather. Your leather cover is transformed from a simple cover, to something that is unique and interesting! Please note that I’m a super fan of simple leather journals, and often times, a simple leather cover without any additional embellishments is the best! But every once in a while, you want to create something interesting and fun and different – and I find leather stencils to be a great way to do that.

Here is another example of how I’ve used leather stencils on a cover:

If you want to use leather stencils, do make sure that you’re buying a good quality one that’s sharp and can pierce through thick leather to make a clean cut. There are plenty of cheap stencils available but unless they are sharp, you’ll only end up ruining the cover of your lovely handmade journal – you do not want that 😦 I ordered this one on Amazon and so far it works great for me (no affiliate link here, don’t worry! 🙂 )

Once you get used to using stencils, you can make all sorts of shapes and combine shapes to make new shapes. I’ve found these to be a great way to add a little variety to my books. Hope you’ll enjoy them too!