As I write this shortly before Christmas, I believe I have found the most appropriate commemorative leather Christmas ornament of the year 2020: the Tiny Doctor mask key fob from Dieselpunk.ro. It’s the perfect DIY gift, especially for crafters looking to make something special at the last minute.
With about 30 minutes to an hour to spare, a small amount of scrap leather, and a slightly dark sense of humor, you, too, can make the Tiny Doctor mask your ticket to the last-minute leather gift hall of fame this year…of course, the line between fame and infamy is blurry.
If you give this as a gift, I hope your recipient thinks it’s as funny as you do. My last tiny doctor ornament went to a friend who had just come back out of quarantine from a knockout combo of covid-19, flu, and strep (she swears she didn’t go licking any doorknobs, honest), and it was pretty well-received. May your Tiny Doctor find an appreciative audience, too.
The Pattern
Tony See is the main mind behind Dieselpunk.ro’s patterns, though he does spend time crowd-sourcing ideas from his swelling fan base of likewise slightly-twisted leatherheads on facebook (you guys know what you are). While Tony’s pattern downloads themselves are quite easy to read and use, his tutorial videos are what really makes them stand out. The pattern was originally free (to “protect your keys…from being boring!”), but Tony mostly offers his free patterns for only a short time, and this particular key fob pattern is now a part of several etsy downloadable pattern bundles. I recommend the one that comes with the tiny dragon head. The video below shows you how to run your stitching (very important, but I do have one note on that process later in this review that might save you some annoyance on your first attempt):
The Advice
There are six pieces to the pattern: two sides, a bottom jaw area, the top of the head, and two itty bitty eye pieces that can cause you some grief if your leather is too stiff to slide an x-acto knife through. I know this because I cut the eyes out of a piece of veg tan that I am attempting to get rid of in bits; it cuts less like butter and more like a thin slab of concrete. Tony has some advice for this process in the video, but I don’t have exact tools he shows and I had to improvise a little bit. The best advice I have here is that you can punch the holes in the eyepieces after you cut them out instead of before to save yourself some grief.
Note on the stitching: joining the side and jaw pieces is simple. Two threads, saddle-stitched. But EVERYTHING ELSE is joined with just one thread, so use at least the length of the mask from the nose tip up to the top of the head, triple it, then double that. I didn’t notice that this was going to be one of Tony’s genius little stitching hacks, so I ran out of thread before making it through the first eyepiece. Putting in a second thread isn’t fun.
My only other tip is about choosing the leather. Obviously give this a go with whatever you’ve got on hand (a main selling point of this pattern is its use with scrap), but if you want it to survive very long in someone’s pocket or keep its shape when you stitch, use a stiff veg tan in about 4-5oz (or 1.6 to 2mm). Veg tan is also important if you want to put a 2020 stamp on it, but I figure after this year that aspect isn’t essential. If you can’t manage the eyepieces in the veg tan, contrasting eye pieces from another leather look great, too, and they don’t really detract from the key fob’s structure. As an ornament, though, really anything goes. I’ve even seen this pattern made well out of paper, which is really cool.
Add red dye and a white faux (or real?) fur beard and you’ve got yourself a very festive little pandemic Santa mask!
Or not.
To sum up, this is a genius little pattern for last minute leather gifts or for just using up scrap. A tiny plague doctor mask leather Christmas tree ornament is pretty much the best sum up of 2020 I can think of; hopefully, next year it won’t be nearly as relevant (though still a cool gift; I mean, it’s an itty bitty nitty gritty…okay, I’ll stop now).
Stay safe, stay well, and get back to work.
Questions? Comments? Disappointed that I didn’t use any plague-related Monty Python gifs in this post? Chuck it in the comment box below!