Rogue Leather

I can’t remember where I heard the term, but somewhere on the Internet is a guy who called a minimalist wallet a “Dance Card wallet”, and the phrase stuck in my head. Points to anyone who can find original attribution.

In any case, the wife has been carrying all her must-have cards around in one of those little pull-out ID slots rather than carry her full wallet because of the space it takes up, so I thought I could do one better. This one has two pockets on the back and a full window on the front, including a vinyl inlay to keep the card from falling out. I cut the pockets generous enough to allow for double-stacking the cards if needed.

I think I should have gone back over those stitch grooves with a brush, seems a little pale behind the thread. Notes for the next model…

My daughter took up role-playing games recently, so we’ve set her up with her own set of dice – but of course, she’ll need a snazzy way to carry them around, right? :)

I’ve made a couple of these before, but thought I would hit a Norse/viking theme for this one.

There are two inscriptions, both thanks to the fine folks over at Viking Rune. The top one says “af heppni er sigr”, which loosely translates to “from luck, victory”. The bottom inscription is a simple transliteration of “Blood for Odin”, which is a reference to this happy tale.

The inner design itself is a reference to the time Odin stole all of the mead. There’s a true viking for ya!

When I first got back into the whole leatherworking gig and was kitting out my tools, I picked up a marble slab from my friendly local leather store. It was a 12″ square remnant from a counter top remodeling job or some such. It did the job ok, but a couple months after I got it I managed to knock it over on the garage floor and broke off a fair chunk of one of the corners. I haven’t been happy with it since, and I’ve been keeping my eye out for a replacement.

This hasn’t been easy. I’ve called around to all the local stone suppliers, and the answer has been a consistent maximum of 1.25″ thick or they never bothered to return my call. I’ve even checked with a few mortuaries, to no avail.

About a week ago, however, I came across an outfit on Amazon selling a granite surface plate for an extremely reasonable price. A surface plate is a granite slab specifically planed and finished to be a precision-ground true and flat surface used by craftsmen and tool makers to ensure proper angles and straight edges, and they usually run a couple-hundred bucks. I figured it was too good to be true, but added it to my basket anyway to see what the horrendous shipping charges would be. I mean really – a 3-inch thick slab of granite’s gotta weigh over 70 pounds, right? That will be hell to ship…

A whopping $10 !?!

Click-click-BUY!

Now, a week of “where the hell IS the dratted truck??” later, and I have my very own too-damn-heavy-to-move permanently placed slab o’ rock:

(Forgive the mess in the back, I had to clear space in a hurry.)

It even comes with a lab analysis sheet telling me it’s accurate to within 0.0005″ of being absolutely flat. Close enough, I suppose… :) As an added benefit, with that much mass, any tooling I do will be much quieter and won’t disturb the rest of the household or my neighbors quite so much.

Now I just hope the table holds up…

We play a lot of Quiddler in this house, so naturally we like to take one with us when we travel. The box it normally comes in is fine, but we’ve been in a couple spots where it would be nice to have something to corral all of the cards during the game so that they don’t slide all over the place – the deck is over 100 cards, so it can get pretty messy if your only horizontal surface isn’t exactly firm or level…

In any case, I thought it would be nice to have a custom case for our most-played game. You could use this same idea for any number of large-deck card games.

The original design idea seen here was pieced-together and box-stitched, and I think it would still be a nice way to do it – but I didn’t get my seam allowances correct in this prototype, and the thing ended up being too small (by like an effing millimeter…) so I had to rebuild from scratch. And while the box stitch always looks good, it’s a pain in the ass so I went with the frame-and-cap design I  used originally on the card divider way back when.

As you can see on the final piece, by the time I was ready to do the top, I was completely sick of sewing and came up with a folded & riveted design instead. It came out just the slightest bit… off… somehow, and the corners aren’t all exact, but it was good enough to keep so I left it alone.

Speaking of “off”, if you look at the top in that first picture, you may notice that my geometric stamp pattern isn’t quite straight as well. Turns out, doing this sort of pattern stamping is a bit of a beast, and you really need a guide framework to get it perfect. Luckily, there’s a Craftaid for that, and it’s on my shopping list. Highly recommended if you plan on doing this sort of thing.

Sitting at my workbench one day, I realized I had collected quite a few stamping tools, and they could no longer be stored in the nooks and crannies of my original tool roll. While the ubiquitous plastic tool rack is available almost anywhere, I felt that it lacked a certain … something – and I felt I could do better.

Crayola defined the way to properly store imagination decades ago when they released the 64-crayon box, and I felt that this iconic shape would be the perfect place to store the current tools of my imagination.

Going through it in my head, I realized that any hinge mechanism allowing the top to flip back like the original box would be fragile and likely to tear, so I would have to come up with something different. What I came up with in the end is a sliding pivot that allows the top to come straight up, spin over, and then rotate down in front to become a stand of sorts, allowing the case to lean forward and present the tools in a way that makes it easier to see and select them.

Inside the case, I used a piece of packing foam from a computer box as a medium to shove the tools into, and this worked out very well. I removed just enough of the material in each hole to allow the stem of the tool, but it is still tight enough to provide a little friction and prevent the tools from just falling out if it gets bumped around. Probably not really necessary, but I like it.

For the color, I used a block-dying technique with Eco-Flow Saddle Tan gel antique for the bulk of it, and then good ol’ Fiebing’s Black oil dye on the edges. As you can see in the teaser post before this one, the color came out really good.

Unfortunately, when I went to apply a coat of Fiebing’s Leather Balm with Atom Wax, something went wrong and it pulled most of the color out of the box top assembly. I ended up having to go over the black with a brush and a paper towel to blot it down.

Still, I’m very pleased with how the stitching turned out, and the rotating hinge worked out really well so we’ll call it a success.

I decided I needed a box to store my stamps in, and the engineer in me came up with a snazzy idea that you’ll see in the finished project post. For now, here’s a shot of the box top that I put together today:

The box stitch is a bitch – but it looks great if you can pull it off. In this case, I almost didn’t – the first hole I punched with my awl tore through. (It’s on the back so it isn’t readily apparent, but I may rivet a ‘bandage’ across it and add a matching one on the other side just to make sure it doesn’t lead to problems as it wears.)

This made me sit back and finally figure out a trick for punching the holes for this stitch. I cut a spare block of wood into a right triangle, and when I place that on my cutting board so that the ‘peak’ is pointing up and then lay the leather on it so the beveled edge is flat on the cutting surface, I can punch straight down through the groove with a stitching chisel and come out right where I want it. Here’s a diagram that makes it a little plainer – you’re seeing everything from the side:

The tiny arrow is aimed at the groove, and the vertical thing is of course my chisel punched straight down through the leather.

Now the trick is going to be building essentially a radial arm saw that uses Olfa rolling knife blades to make a perfect edge bevel…

Hey, he’s not dead!

My first smartphone was a T-Mobile Wing about 6 years ago. It was the only one I’ve purchased where the holster that came with the phone outlasted the phone. I still have it, and it’s in great condition.

All the other phones I’ve had since then have gone through at least two holsters each. part of this can be attributed to me being a cheapskate when it comes to buying them, but there’s also something to be said for them using cheap materials.

This one is made out of top-quality veg-tan cowhide and lined with a rather nice pigskin that the wife picked up a while back. For the closure, I simply harvested the magnets from a couple of my previous holsters and glued them into cutouts I made in the leather.

To make the cutouts, I set my V-groover to about half the thickness of the leather and used it to draw out a rectangle where I wanted each magnet to go, then went back over the whole area a number of times to remove the material down to depth. After some careful cleanup with a razor knife, I had rectangular depressions in the leather. Apply several coats of black dye, let it set, and then I simply glued the magnets in place. Once the glue set, I glued that pigskin over the top.

For added magnetism, I glued some additional metal strips onto the magnets, which also gave me more surface area for the glue to ensure the magnets don’t wander off like they have in other cases I’ve used.

For the belt attachment, a simple loop strap is sewn in place. In this pic you can see the creases – I grooved the other side before I glued the pigskin in place to assist the bends at those points. If I ever build another, I may groove several additional lines through there to make it more flexible.

There are a couple of kits available for smartphone holsters, but they go a different route and use one piece for the back & flap, then another for the front pocket. Not a bad design, just more complicated and finicky than it needs to be. I just took one rectangle of leather and folded it in thirds like a letter going into an envelope, then sewed the “walls” in at the ends.

After sewing the whole thing up, the flap didn’t quite want to stay closed by magnetism alone, so I folded it closed and buried it under my marble slab with a few other heavy objects on top overnight. That persuaded the leather that ‘closed’ is a good place to be, and it’s been fine since.

I was inspired to make bracelets as gifts for my wife and daughter this year and thought you might like to see the results. Each one is a two-layer affair, with the bottom layer getting the carving and the top layer merely acting as a frame. Here’s the one I made for my wife:

And here’s the one for my daughter. I gave hers and archery theme:

For those who may attempt something like this yourself, make it at least 1/2″ longer than you think it needs to be. Wrapping a measuring tape around the wrist doesn’t account for the thickness of the material, and you’ll end up being the wrong size. The one for my wife there is the MkII, and I’ll be re-making the one for my daughter as well for this reason.

Okay, so I got the quiver done:

LoadedForBale

(yuk yuk)

A simple design that I unabashedly stole from Evrard de Valogne’s picture set posted to Flickr. He’s heavy into the SCA and used this pattern in several classes he taught, so I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mind. Here’s what it looked like before the coloring process:

It’s just a simple tube about 19″ long, with a bit of a cutout at the throat. The base is an inverted cup wet-formed around a can and then stitched in. To hang it, that rectangle gets folded in half over a belt and the two straps riveted into the corners, then the fancy bits to the right hold on a set of D-rings forming the anchors for the straps.

For color, I used Tandy’s Eco-Flo Antique in Mahogany.

In Evrard’s original photos, the seam on the tube is an overlap, but I decided I had to try and improve that. Instead, I butted the two ends and then sewed a strip onto it using a nice lace. I put a pair of rivets into the top two holes just to make sure it didn’t come apart on me, then sewed it from the bottom up.

When you stitch with lace like this, make sure you go back to the beginning and tighten every stitch all the way up to the top – I ended up pulling another 4 inches of lace back out and getting a nice tight seam all the way up. Also watch your pattern – it makes a difference if the same over/under pattern is present through the whole seam.

I had originally opted for a fixed-length strap, but had to put buckles in because I didn’t estimate the canting angle correctly and it was on the verge of tipping the arrows out all the time – I had to shorten up that front strap to get a better angle. I also managed to punch the mounting holes for the D-ring placement crossways to what I should have done and in the wrong place, so I ended up with extra holes – I filled ’em in with rivets and it isn’t that bad.

And yes, the placement of the carving is deliberate, I wanted to show it off so I rolled it around to the side other people could see while I was wearing it.

All-in-all, not bad for a first attempt. It still seems a little front-heavy, so I’ve taken to just keeping a set of knocking pliers in the bottom to weigh it down on that end. having it must have given me some extra confidence last week or something – I finally managed to start grouping shots on  the target.

I’ll see you on the range.

My daughter and I have decided to take up archery for fun. (Well, take archery back up for me – I used to shoot ages ago…). But you know what a new hobby needs, right? New accessories!

While my daughter is shooting kinda modern-traditionalist, I went whole-hog primitive and got myself an actual longbow – Red Oak backed with linen. Being a period longbow, that means it doesn’t have an arrow rest / shelf like modern bows do – you rest the arrow on your knuckle and shoot off of that. Being that I sincerely do not want to experience the horrible delight of having fletching stuck in my hand, I made myself a little thumb-and-forefinger rig to keep between me and my fletchings (bottom right), as well as a bracer to keep from smacking my forearm with a bowstring. The funky thing at the top goes on your drawing-hand fingers to protect you from the string.

And yes, I am still unsatisfied with the way the bracer attaches. Tying one on is a pain with one hand, and buckles isn’t much better. I’ll figure that out eventually… probably about the time I get the quiver done.