Four Leather Letters

Recently I considered getting into leatherwork, I thought it might be nice to try and make myself a wallet or a belt or something like that. I watched a few YouTube videos and was pretty close to buying all of the kit and then an idea started forming, what if I could make a physical object, in leather, that'd link back to this very website? It'd reward people for being curious and it'd ground this site in reality, or something. It's a little bit pretentious, perhaps, but I thought it'd be a fun thing to try. 
Leatherwork is hard or at least, it looks like it's hard. What isn't that hard, is getting a custom metal stamp made in China, buying some alphabet stamps, a big hammer thing (I think that's called a mallet - ed.), some rivets & a rivet setter and a bunch of leather keyring blanks. 

So that's what I did. I got a little glyph icon thing generated, added a URL underneath and had it turned into a stamp for 'veg tan leather' - it's the brass looking bit you can see above. 
Vegetable Tanned leather is typically what people are using to make leather accessories and it's a good material for this because you make it a bit wet and then it'll accept a stamp (once you give it a decent whack with a big hammer thing)

At this point I have a little leather ballsack with my website address on it, so how do I end up turning that into the multi-modality wonderous object I teased in the intro? Alphabet stamps - stamp a four letter code and suddenly I can link to content on this very site like some sort of archaic URL shortener.

This is the last image of me hitting something with a hammer, for this post at least.

Supremely eagle-eyed arps.io readers (are there any out there?) might have noticed a little green glyph icon around the site - until today, they only appeared in the 'street specimens' section of the site but I had the idea to expand it out into these blog posts and in fact, to any content that exists on this site. A green glyph icon indicates that a node is out in the wild, waiting to be found. An orange glyph means that one has been found by some lucky person. How it works is that I generate a unique 4 letter code that I link to an item somewhere on this site - maybe it's a trace (blog post), a tracelet (micro blog post), a street specimen (my 'I need to get better at photography' scavenger hunt) or a gallery item. I stamp that onto the leather and then leave the keyring at the place relating to that piece of content. The idea is that it'll reward someone inquisitive enough to pick up the keyring and visit the site (you'd hope that if they've gotten that far, they'll have the mental fortitude to type the four letters into the 'entry' page) 

If I did successfully lure in such a curious person, and they did put their node code into the form, then they'll be treated to an image that I've taken at, or within spitting distance of, where they are currently standing. The image will be displayed with varying levels of decay, dependent on how long the tag has been sitting out in the cold. Below you'll see that the Portland Bill lighthouse node has been online for over three months and has decayed almost to the point of being an incomprehensible glitched out nightmare. I suspect that tag won't ever be found. Or it's currently sitting pride of place in a magpie's nest. 

At this point, the finder can click 'acknowledge' which will return the image to it's former glory and the glyph icons for it will turn orange across the site. That to me seems pretty cool - there's a possibility a node will be found and that'd please me - someone managed to find and follow the thread and bring the signal back online, closing the loop. There's something in it for the finder too, curiosity is rewarded and they'll find out what interested me about the place, or at least get to see a photo that I thought looked cool. Alternatively (and at this point, probably less likely) is that someone might see a blog post on this site, notice the active glyph icon and decide to visit the place and hunt down their own leather arps.io keyring. 
I was already set on doing something with leather but decided that it was absolutely the best choice for this - I am sort of littering by leaving these things about so I didn't want to use plastic or something that people would consider junk. I want people to see one of these things and think 'Yeah, that's worth picking up' and I think hand crafted leather, with its imperfections and blemishes is the right material for that.

I've got no idea what mink oil is, if it's actually just blended mink then please don't tell me in the comments. All I know is it protects the leather from the elements and makes it turn a nicer shade. Here I am applying it with my finger.
So that's it really, my physical/digital node linking concept. I hope you think it's as cool as I do - I'll keep leaving them around the place and maybe one day someone will read this text because they found one.