How I Made My Elvish Finishing Tools
So in my last post I briefly mentioned that I made a bunch of tools so my titling for the Silmarillion could look like this:
Titling--Tengwar (Feanorean) characters, in the Classical mode
I made nine tools in total (and will almost certainly be making the six or so more that I need to be able to tool the entire alphabet). Finishing tools are used in bookbinding to impress designs into leather. The general method when tooling on a fine binding is to make a light impression with a cold tool, then to heat the tool to a sizzle and go over the impression again, and then to dampen the leather and tool it with a warm tool. If done well, you end up with crisp, smooth impressions that are darker than the surrounding leather. This is called blind tooling. They can be left blind, gilded with gold or palladium, or tooled with smoke or carbon to make a very black impression. Read the rest of this entry »
