Oxblood case with a brass owl

The owl came from the client — a cast brass concho she had kept in a drawer for years. Everything else was built around it: the flap window is cut so the wings sit inside a stitched frame rather than floating on a plain panel.

Oxblood is a difficult colour to keep clean; we dyed light, then pushed the red darker only at the edges and around the stitch lines so the middle of each panel still glows. Thread is pale pink, which sounds wrong and looks right.

The recipient's initial is struck into the lower body with a heated stamp — deep enough to feel with a thumb, undyed, so it reads only when the light is low.