Rogue Leather

After about a year with the modded computer desk as a primary workbench, we’ve made some adjustments. One of these is we balanced a board between my right-hand drawers and the computer case on the left at the back of the desk to keep the kitten from playing in the cords back there. This of course turned into Kitty Highway 101, and eventually to both cats deciding my desk was an onramp, no matter what sharp bits may have been laying out.

This was starting to piss me off pretty good. Plus, I have all these sharp bits laying out and needed more organization. So, viola! Pegboard walls to block the cats and hang my tools on.

Home Despot carries pegboard in 1/4 sheet “hobby boards”, and the birch 2×2’s were easy enough to trim to length with my jigsaw. The walls were screwed to the 2×2’s, and then I ran a pocket screw through each of the uprights and down into the work surface. So far I haven’t needed to brace it any.

My lovely wife requested a handbag, and chose a rose motif for the carving. I’m not very good at floral carving, but I can follow a good tutorial as well as the next guy, so I went out and found a few good tutorials. And a vintage pattern – I think my mom used to have a purse much like this one way back in the day.

There are a couple things that need some tweaking if I ever do this again, but all in all, I’m pleased with the results.

Can you guess what’s next?

I took advantage of a downtime at work and talked the boss into giving me a week off, so I’ve been tooling around the last few days trying out a few new ideas and working on my skills.

One of the dreams in the back of my head is to someday quit my day job and just be a leathercrafter as a paying trade, so I keep my eye out for things I could sell. One such item is a combination wallet and cover for a notebook.

They have a version of this on the Field Notes website, and I’ve seen a couple variants on Etsy sites, so I thought I’d whip up my own version:

This is basically a prototype, so I just kept it simple and natural rather than dying it. At this point it’s just burnished edges and a swipe with some saddle soap to clean up the scraps I used to make it.

The height of a Field Notes notebook means you have a little extra if you place the card pockets as shown here, but I haven’t come up with a good way to get around it yet. The double row of stitching seems to be the consensus as the way do deal with it. The next one may have vertical card slots instead. Behind the cards is another pocket for notes or paper money.

This ended up being the slightest bit too small, an annoying trend in my prototypes. It takes a little finagling to get the notebook properly ensconced in its pocket, and the back pocket on the left side could be a tad shorter – or the whole thing could be a tad wider making for a larger “middle” space between the sides.

All in all, however, I’d say it’s a success. Now to figure out a good way to get a pen loop in there…

My older brother was impressed with my Firefly wallet and his birthday is this month so I made him something to show off.

And the inside:

Each of those diagonal slots will hold two or three cards, so there’s plenty of space.

Several years back the wife tripped across the SHARPEST GORRAM KNIVES EVAR, and we’ve had to create new rules for dealing with them around the house lest we inadvertently lose an appendage. (Seriously, these things are like eating with a lightsaber. “Oh, I’ll just cut off a piece of this steak, mmm, wait, why did the table fall apart?”)

So, considering we have a bin for keeping tableware in when we go camping the chances of randomly losing a finger while looking for a spoon were pretty high, and the wife asked me to do something about it.

Voila.

(On a side note, pretty new slab under the sheath there. Woot.)

I may have come up with a solution to the lack-of-a-workspace idea. Since I couldn’t set up a dedicated workspace, I decided to multi-task one of my existing emplacements – my computer desk. Here you can see the humble beginnings…

That desk is either from IKEA or someplace spiritually close to it. I picked up the desk way back in 1998 (ye gods) and I’ve been dragging it around ever since. (Shockingly enough, the cam screws are just as tight today as when I assembled it so many years ago.) It’s decent enough, but the wood is MDF and likely to fall apart on me if I do any serious work on it.

Additionally, I’d need to get the monitor and speakers up off the desk – they would get bounced around too much anytime I needed to set a rivet or grommets, and the prolonged tappity-tappity of tooling would probably do bad things for the monitor’s backlight. Read more »

The World has impinged itself upon my reality once again, and it appears I will be on a temporary hiatus from leatherwork while I figure out some changes. We ended up having to move last month, and ended up in an apartment without a garage – which has always been my workspace.

The new apartment is on the ground floor, so I can probably get away with the noisy aspects of the craft (if for no other reason than the noise generated by the posse of rugrats that roams the grassy areas outside my windows), but we have a pair of cats, and one thing I know for certain is that cats + dye = 6 different kinds of mess.

So, it may be a month or so until I sort this all out. Come back later this summer and see what I’ve managed.

I have no worldly need for a wallet of this nature, and yet my brain would simply not let the idea go – so I made one. If nothing else, it was a learning experience and if I ever make another, that next wallet will be better for having made this one.

Still, I think it’s really cool :)

While I would love to have done a more detailed view of Serenity on the back, doing so would have required doing a much large image, and I was concerned about how folding it through the middle would affect the image, so we get just an outline.

The ‘back’ side makes everyone say “aww…” and sniff a little because that rat bastard killed Wash, but we’ll get over it someday:

On the inside, we find the usual zippered pocket and a stack of card slots. I’ve added another card slot behind the zipper pocket as a convenient place to stash my driver’s license. I tossed the idea of adding an ID card slot with a window to the front of the zipper pocket, but couldn’t quite come up with a design I liked. I’ll have to revisit that in the next one.

Speaking of that zipper – the big chunky one looks cool and all, but it doesn’t want to close once I have it opened. folding the pocket over tightly like that makes the teeth go out of alignment when you’re trying to close it. I’ll have to use a smaller zipper next time.

I lined the interior with the same pigskin that I used in the cell phone belt case I made some time ago. This leaves open the possibility of installing an RFID-proof liner in the next model as well – something I will probably do once the USA gets in sync with the rest of the world and starts using the new chip-and-pin cards like they use in Europe.

Here it is with some cards installed and the pockets open. There’s a bill pocket behind both sides, so plenty of room to store the cash that I never carry. (I live on my debit card instead.)

Again, I think it came out pretty cool, despite the horrible block-dye job on the front. (More like blotch-dye job. I bought an airbrush to make that better in the future, just need to practice with it.)

Now I either have to start wearing a sport coat or get a job that doesn’t mind me wearing jeans to the office.

As an update to the previous post, I used that method on the piece below, which will be a wallet backplate in the near future. A little over 2 hours worth of carving and stamping, and no curl on the edges or general deformation. And indeed, those impressions are better looking than some of my previous attempts.

As you can see, i went with the packing tape method today, and it worked out really well. Removal was simple, and just left me with a slightly fuzzy backside:

Shiny!