Leather Mounting Plaques

I bought some small, 3" leather furniture swatches at the thrift store recently and came up with a fun way to repurpose them. Mounting plaques for jewelry! These little swatches can often be found on ebay, or, if you don’t have leather to work with, remember that you can find an inexpensive, second hand leather purse or jacket to cut up. Or, go with other material such as a textured leather-like cover of an old discarded book.I dug through my stash of little trinkets and came up with some things to mount. You can also use items from your jewelry box, like an old earring missing it’s match, tie tacks, lapel pins, etc.I created sets of mounting plaque shapes, plain and with wood grain (using photographed wood surfaces in my house) that you can transfer to leather like I did with iron-on sheets made for dark t-shirts. Click on the image of the plaques to download your free PDF file.Using a great little punch tool that came with a set of metal alphabet stamps I have, I was able to punch neatly through the leather that I’d transferred the dark wood image to for placing the deer tack through, as well as punching holes for jump rings in other plaques.I used a touch of adhesive on the back of the deer to keep it from turning on the plaque.With the lighter wood plaque, I mounted a vintage button.I printed the plaque image to cardstock to create templates to trace for cutting around and sewing. For the green leather mount, I stitched it to a piece of backing fabric. Without using my foot pedal on my sewing machine, I stitched by pressing the needle-up-down button on my machine to go slow enough to control the tight turns around the shape of the plaque. Using E6000 adhesive, I glued backing pins to several of the plaques. For my scissors and hand pins, I left enough thread hanging to create a cool effect.You can flip the leather over and mount on the suede side as I did here for pendants using an old cabinet key wrapped in cotton-covered wire, and another with a little brass stamping of a fisherman. There are lots of projects you can create other than jewelry with the plaque shapes, including ornaments, applique, and magnets. Share your ideas in the comment section!