Soutwestern Leather Box

Any suggestions on origin and age?
Thanks

 

I hope somebody can tell something about this. It seems to have astral/astronomical inspirations... really interesting symbols, too.

 

Personally, am getting a vision of a 1960s-70s hippie, named something like Mark, Mork, or Monk, doing art shows, flea markets, and Grateful Dead concerts, happily tooling his latigo leather stash boxes with commercial stamps, but adding his own very special symbolism, probably fueled by hallucinatory visions...

~Cheryl

 

I see Navajo stamping....like you'd see on their silver...the Thunderbird & rain clouds....

 

I see stamps from a commercial set, to my eye nothing like the hand-cut stamps used on Navajo silver (suppose the later silversmiths might use professionally made stamps). Can remember Tandy having these when I was tooling leather in the early to mid '70s: https://www.tandyleather.com/en/product/native-american-symbol-stamp-set

He's also used a couple sizes of stars, a basic carving stamp, a flower, and a scroll border - the stamping seems done both decoratively and in some cryptic arrangement. Do you see this this as a Navajo item, Komo?

~Cheryl

 

I didn't mean to suggest that it's Navajo made & I can't guess at the astrological meanings.

Sure, modern leather tools may be made to simulate old Navajo designs....I would think.

How about.....Southwest NA ' flavor ' ???

 

Late 20th c leathercrafter thingy, possibly made as a vacuum-cleaner cozy, but we don't know the size.

 

Looks like the designs were "factory" made with an embossing machine and not hand tooled.

 

Can't really see anything 'factory' about this item other than the origin of the stamps used. Have little doubt that it's hand-done, though in truth, it's barely tooled, that really involves cutting and stamping to give a textured, dimensional design - this work is typical of the numerous leather-workers, present at pretty much every arts & crafts venue in the late '60s-early '70s, who produced the ubiquitous latigo leather handbags that most every girl had to have...

~Cheryl

 

Thanks for the replies. About 5" tall. It does appear to have been made using stamps but I find it kind of cool.

 

I saw an older leather box of same size and shape, no tooling, which vendor identified as a collar keeper from a time and place where tall, white, starched separate collars were common. I used those collars on my "full dress blue" Navy midshipman uniform ca. 1970 so the collars didn't totally disappear eons ago.