Rogue Leather

My friend Illyana found a nice little belt knife at the last event we went to, but the sheath was just atrocious – looks like it was one they had just lying around and it fit well enough, so they packaged it. I couldn’t stand to see the knife in that ugly thing, and Illyana had a birthday coming up, so for the second time now she gets a new scabbard.

Now most of you should be familiar with the sheaths sold today – they only encase the blade of the knife, and then have a snap-strap to secure it in place. While this is a useful configuration, the more period method is the pouch sheath, which leaves only the last inch or so of the handle exposed. This is actually a more secure arrangement than the snap method, since you won’t ever accidentally unsnap it and risk the knife falling out on your foot, and with proper design the sheath will hold the knife securely through much bumping and jumping around.

To give full credit, I stole the design from Bruce Evans and the tutorial you will find at that link. I left the points sharper on mine than he did, but I followed his tutorial with the exception of using a drill bit instead of a nail to punch the holes for sewing, and I used a heavy thread instead of sinew. The sinew would have been more period, but I didn’t have any on hand.

I skipped the wax bath, mainly because I don’t really like the texture of wax-treated leather. Illyana is mildly into leatherwork herself, so she knows how to care for it properly. I also decided to forego any carving on this one, since I was going to dye it black, and the decoration gets lost in a black dye unless you paint it afterward. Knife sheaths get bumped around a lot so that paint would get abused pretty badly.

Here it is basically complete and waiting for the oil to dry before I dye it (with the original sheath for comparison.)

And with the knife sheathed:

Unfortunately, I forgot to snap a pic after I dyed it, so you’ll just have to use your imagination.

Here’s a quick pic of the finished pouch:

I ended up doing a selective dye method – I used a brush instead of a wool dauber to apply the dye, and I like the effect. This is the first finished piece after talking with a guy who swears by the oil dyes. His advice was to rub the piece with Neatsfoot Oil and let it sit for a day, then use an oil dye. Not too shabby.

One of the things I have been trying to do since I started all of this is to replace all of my current leather gear with something more elaborate and decorative. A mug frog is fairly simple, but my pouch is sorely in need of an upgrade.

It was purchased at an event, and cost was a major factor at the time, so it is very plain, the leather is a little sub-par, and I’m not 100% pleased with the design. So, I’ve made a lot of pouches in an effort to come up with the perfect replacement.

My first attempt was a success as far as construction went, but it was still plain and a little small for the amount of junk that normally gets tossed in there at an event. (Smokes, lighter, mints, flashlight, about half of my wallet – you get the picture.) So, off I went again. And again. And again…

The latest version is yet another change to the overall design – just two pieces instead of three or four in an effort to reduce the amount of sewing. The design works, but again this one is a tad small. I do need to pile up some stuff to auction off for our pavilion fund, however, so I thought I would dress this one up with some tooling.

The leather in the construction won’t tool, so I will be sewing or riveting something on to the flap. I’m leaning toward rivets – I like the visual better sometimes, but mostly I just don’t like sewing. (I really need a deeper jaw on the stitching pony for most of my work.) I was playing around with my drafting tools, and came up with a nice Celtic Trefoil design:

The rivets will go in the center of the three foils and also on either side of each tip, so it will be pretty secure. The closure, of course, is always my biggest headache of the design process because there are so many ways to do it, and what will work best? I really only get one shot at each pouch.

I thought I would give that Walnut oil dye one more chance, and used it on another design that I had screwed up, and I am once again thoroughly unimpressed with the results. There will be a trip to the store on my schedule for this weekend.

This last weekend, however, put another two projects on my list, as J bought a new sword and needs a good frog to hang it off his belt and K got herself a new knife with a lousy scabbard. Maybe I should just buy a hide this weekend while I’m at the store…

These little things are designed to help a lady keep her skirts out of the mud – or perhaps show off her petticoats, if she’s of a mind :) It’s just a simple length of leather folded over to pinch another fold with some D-rings in their grip.

To use them, hang them on your belt and pull a section of fabric up through both rings, then run it back through only one of them and pull it tight. (Just like you would for a motorcycle helmet strap.)

I like to use an offset color for the smaller piece. Use a stiff leather for the long piece and a softer leather to hold the rings so they move freely. It helps to skive down the tips of the stiff leather if your rivets aren’t long enough. You can also groove the leather at the fold, but you can usually just give it a couple whacks with a mallet and pound it into submission ;)

I suppose this should be under Projects, but it was such a simple little thing, and I did it for fun while camping over Memorial Day weekend. I had been keeping my sewing needles piled into one of the segments in my parts box – the same one I keep my stamping tools in. This has led to a couple of near-misses of me stabbing my finger, so it was time to move them.

Construction was fairly simple. Two pieces sewn together at the bottom, with a third piece of suede folded in between to push the needles through. A little tooling and a snap closure, and voila! Here’s the finished product:

Did I mention I went camping at a Pirate event? :)

The big surprise for me was that I sold everything I had at my friend’s merchant booth – I almost broke even for the event! I guess now I have to build some more goods to restock.

The project has been finished, and I thought I’d show you a few of the stages involved. Here we can see that I have completely cut the final design and beveled the edges. I’m quite happy with the result, although I have once again forgotten to purchase tracing paper and got one of the trefoil arms slightly off-center at the join. It doesn’t stick out too terribly bad. It gives it character, dammit!

Once I had that done, I glued together all of the welts and then carved them back down to the proper slope. That was tricky, almost ended up throwing the first attempt away. Once I had it all laid out though, I knew it would work. So, on to some glue and garage bondage:

Bulldog clips are your friends.

Once that was dry, I gouged the stitching groove and used my overstitch wheel to mark off the stitches. Then I took a long look at myself in the mirror and forgave myself for what I was about to do…

I cheated.

The ghost of Al Stohlman may haunt me for it, but I knew there was no way I was ever going to push an awl through all of that leather – Hell, I stabbed myself in the finger on a test piece and damn near severed a nerve!

While I could have possibly driven the awl through with a hammer, my stitching awl is a two-piece model that can change blades and I figured I would probably just break the darn thing. Instead, I put a 1/16th inch drill bit in my Dremmel and drilled about 95% of the way through everything from the cut side down. That took about 75% of the work out of pushing the awl through it to stretch the holes and the last layer of leather – this way the stitch is held more firmly by the leather trying to seal up around it. It also allowed me to make sure the hole on the far side was in the groove.

The next day it was time to break in my new stitching pony and get sewin’. Of course, I broke a needle on the third stitch – crappy needle selection on my part. For leather this heavy (8/9 ounce) get a #000 Harness needle and you should be ok. Those “general purpose” Tandy needles are too thin at the eye and will snap if you wiggle them in an effort to stretch the hole.

Note the extra chunks of leather glued to the pony to protect the work as I stab it.

Now, if you read Al’s book on hand sewing, he tells you to make your threads a double-arm length, or about twelve feet. Here’s why: math. Each of the smallest stitches in this piece took up about 1/2″ of thread on each needle, and the full 26″ seam (24″ inches linear, with an inch of back-stitch on each end) took 18 feet of thread.

Eighteen feet!

The first 5 feet got me just around the first bend, starting from the skinny side. The second 5 feet got me even with the hilt of the sword in the artwork. The third 5 foot thread got all the way to the last linear inch, and then I had to grab another three-foot length to go that inch and the back-stitch.

For your first few stitching projects, your fingers won’t have any protective calluses, and they are going to hurt when you are done. I suggest you get some good leather gloves, which will add protection without ruining your grip or traction. And when you are done, don’t pick up anything hot or you’ll drop it on your foot when you yank your hand back. I almost lost a dinner plate that way.

In this picture, you get to see the finished product: (Thanks to my buddy for the much better pic.)

Now, you may be wondering how I got that interesting finish out of it. Here’s how:

Be a dumbass and try an un-tested Fiebing’s Walnut Oil Dye on a finished project, watch it dye unevenly and panic. Add a second coat of dye before the first has really dried, then rub with a cloth. Watch this one dry until a weird patina forms, then leave it be for 15 minutes. Freak out a little more, then use a Deglazer to remove the patina. Let this dry for about 2 minutes.

After the two minutes, notice that the dye is still uneven and apply a third and fourth coat. Let it sit for ten minutes this time and get that patina going, then hit it one more time with the Deglazer. Now give up forever on getting the color you wanted and rub vigorously with Neatsfoot Oil to try and repair what damage you can.

Voila! You know have a mildly distressed finish to the project that you worked so hard on! The closure tab is the only thing that came out the right color, and there is a small chance that the leather had something to do with it – that bit is from a different hide. It was probably all user error though.

Next project: something a little smaller – a needle case, and possibly a travel case for all my carving tools. Something like a leather pencil box. We’ll see.

*UPDATE* The new owner loves it, and wants to wear it around. If I had thought she might, I would have built it with belt loops…

Illyana calls this thing a Gulloch and claims it is Turkish in origin, supposedly carried by horsemen to cut themselves out of the stirrups in the event that they are unhorsed in battle. I’ve spent a couple hours now trying to find some reference on-line, and can’t find anything for any variant of the spelling. It’s really just a big freakin’ cleaver – a BFK if I ever saw one. See for yourself:

For reference, that is a standard-size Zippo lighter. The blade is 10″ long, 3″ wide at the tip, 3/8″ thick at the hilt, and weighs as much as a good axe. It normally lives in our SCA kitchen tote, which became the home of a family of mice over the winter.

The original scabbard was in bad shape before, but with mice in the tote, I figured it was time to rebuild the scabbard completely. I’ve been meaning to do this for a couple years now because it has been sheathed a couple of times while still dirty, and who knows what kind of nasty was growing in the metal socket at the end of the scabbard.

The original scabbard was black with flowered tooling on it (which I always thought was weird for a big knife) and constructed from a single piece of leather cut so that the stitching was a “Y” seam on the back side of the sheath. While this is cool from an engineering standpoint, it placed a lot of stress at the corners at the bottom, which is where it wore out first. There was also no method of securing the knife in the sheath, so I opted to re-design the whole thing.

The new scabbard will be more like your standard fixed-blade sheath, assembled from two large pieces of leather sewn together around the outside edge, with a welt in between the two pieces to make room for the thickness of the blade. In this instance the welt starts out 2 layers thick on the back due to the thickness of the blade, tapering down to one at the front, then tapering again down to no welt on the blade-edge seam. This will make for a little extra work, but it is worth it.

Okay, maybe a lot of work. I may end up drilling holes through those 4 layers instead of punching them with an awl, we’ll have to see how it goes.

Stylistically I have a bit of a conundrum, since your seam should be the same distance from the edge as the thickness of the material. (I.E., if the material stack is 1/4″ thick, sew 1/4″ from the edge.) Since the thickness changes, I will be splitting the difference instead of using that guide to get a uniform seam width.

Sunday night I got inspired and stayed up way too late working on the artwork, but I have a design on paper, and I cut a proof-of-concept piece. So far, I’m pretty pleased with the design. It’s kind of Celtic knotwork meets Tribal tattoos. No pictures for you yet though, you’ll have to wait.

I started this project a few weeks ago, you can see the original post here, down below the funny picture. Well, I finally sat down and finished the painting and applied a matte finish. I’m pretty happy with the results, once you step past the fact that this is a prototype job – there is a flaw in the leather, and the dye job is pretty atrocious.

Let me take a moment to go into that. On the bottle, the directions clearly state “wipe off the excess dye with a cloth before letting it dry”. What they don’t say is WHY. Here’s why: if you don’t, that puddle of dye will seep into the corners of your cuts and pool up. When it does dry, the liquid medium will have gone away, leaving a crust of pigment behind. If you don’t go back and gently scrape it off, it will flake away over time and / or as the piece is bent and moved.

It’s a bad thing, and easily preventable. And despite your normal reaction in this modern world, do not reach for a paper towel. Paper towels can leave behind lint which may get stuck in the dye, not to mention the fact that they wick that dye right back into your hand. Being the father of a teenager, I have a ton of old t-shirts the boy grew out of before he destroyed them, and I cut them into rags for this purpose.

The tricky part is when to wipe it off – do it too soon, and the dye doesn’t penetrate. Wait a few minutes after applying the dye, and see how well it is absorbing into the leather. If any of the dye doesn’t sink in after a couple of minutes, then you can wipe it up.

Now, on with the pictures: We’ll start with an almost-halfway point. I have shaped the piece, and traced out the entire pattern then cut the center star.

If you look closely, you’ll notice a couple flaws in this piece. It was supposed to be the final version, but I made a couple mistakes when transferring the pattern – it twisted on me slightly. this is why you should use tracing paper and not opaque paper!

This is also why I’m using cheap belly and not the expensive stuff. $25 for a 6-foot by 15-inch piece of scrap is well worth it once you calculate in the knowledge you gained by using it for test work.

The second flaw is a spot in the upper right-hand corner: I dripped a little water here and it dried before I could wipe it up. Since I planned to dye this piece it wouldn’t have been an issue, but it is something you need to watch out for if you want to keep a natural finish.

On to the completed test piece:

You can’t really see it in the picture, but the open spaces to the sides of the star are weakly dyed, and the color is not uniform. Fortunately, the matte finish I applied after painting it has blended the flaws in pretty well, and I could almost ignore it for my personal use. (I wouldn’t give something like this to a friend, though.)

I am very pleased with the way the paint turned out though. Nice even color throughout, and that matte finish gives it a nice, even shine without being too gaudy. This all proves that it can be done, I just need more practice.

Stay tuned for the next project: the Cleaver Scabbard.