Elspeth's Blackjack

(c) Etienne le Mons

My latest leatherwork project was a heraldic blackjack for my friend Elspeth. She really likes her arms as rendered by Etienne le Mons (right), so I printed them out to use as a template for the tooling.

I thought it would be a relatively easy project, as far as the tooling went. Certainly easier than the semy of crosses on my last project! I discovered, however, that getting those flowers to come out looking like anything other than nondescript blobs was quite a challenge (one I'm not sure I completely overcame, to be honest).

I did a lot of the tooling for this project during downtime at work, which generated quite a bit of interest from some of my coworkers. That was pretty cool.

Once the tooling was done, I drilled the holes and stitched the blackjack together. Then I warmed the leather to 185 degrees in my oven before coating the outside of the jack with beeswax.
Once the wax had cooled, I mixed up the EnviroTex Lite and poured it inside the mug. When all interior surfaces were covered, I set the mug aside to dry for 24 hours. After that, I sanded the lip and inside surfaces before pouring in the second coat. After another 24 hours, I repeated the process for the third and final coat.

When the last coat was dry, I once again placed the mug inside my oven, heated to 185 degrees. As the excess wax melted off, I used a pastry brush to touch up where it had absorbed unevenly. This proved very effective, and created a pleasant, uniform, dark brown tone for the mug.