Kevin's warmin' up!

My brother Kevin has his business called Leathersmith's and usually has more than enough business refurbishing other peoples shoes, handbags and sofa's but he's actually quite keen to do stuff in his own way from scratch, as well as incorporate the ideas I have, so this Aethercom thing is a great way for us to start workin' together on something we're both interested in.
He bought an old heavily built lounge suite, two singles and a three, a while back on Trademe and this particular design is very appropriate for the Steampunk genre so for the past week or two he's been filling his spare time doin' his thing on one of the singles.

You can just see the hand painted octopus on the back and this is something we're really goin' to concentrate on as time passes, the fact that this paint system that he uses to recoat leather with spray gun's can be brushed on by hand and be as resilient to wear as we all know leather is. It's actually the elasticisers added to the pigment, carrier and resins that allow this to happen... if you didn't know yet that leather is covered with paint!

Here you can see some of the details with various nails and a strip of brass.

And here's Scott, one of his workers, branching out into metal work with a sheet of copper to cover over the hole in the side.

And this is Boy, Scott's dog, one of three dogs on site while I was there. Kev's old pit bull cross Bruno, Boy, the huntaway, and the old owner's, who happened to be visiting, little scotty... so it's quite the dog friendly place.

But on my drive down there, to get the above photos, I started thinkin' about how we're, the makers, are goin' to front up to sell our wares and how we're goin' to do the costume thing which is a curse I don't need so it occurs to me that we just find a nice woman willing to do the dressup anyways who can front for us. So I put it to Sharla, who does reception and is an old friend's daughter, and she's gone away to think about it but the offers still there, and made right now, if theres anyone out there who'd loved to do the Victorian dress up thing, or is goin' to do it anyways who might wanna spend the day fronting for us... for commission on sales I suppose and some pocket money.