Rogue Leather

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!

Leather stretches and deforms as you carve it, but there are steps you can take to limit this. I’ve been doing a lot of reading over the past few days in preparation for a fairly serious bit of tooling, just to make sure I had my thoughts in order, and there have been some changes since I first started reading the old books and Al Stohlman’s stuff.

For light tooling and stamping the leather won’t stretch much and you can just tool away, but in more serious tooling you need to prepare the leather a little more thoroughly. In basket weaving and geometric stamping, the leather will stretch and curl up around the edges as you work it, so your final dimensions will change and you may not be able to get it flat again. The curling is a real bitch to work around, and all this stretching means you aren’t getting as clean an impression as the leather runs away from the tool.

Once the carving is done you’ll need to do something about the stretch and curl factors. The trick is to glue the leather to something that won’t stretch or curl. in the old days, this meant rubber cement and posterboard, or if you happen to have a way to get it, old X-Ray film was said to be a great medium. In the last few years, however, folks figured out that packing tape works pretty well, and is easier to get and work with.

The steps below are an amalgamation of all the reading I have done:

1. You need to ‘case’ the leather by getting it more thoroughly wet on both sides. Let it air out a bit and start to return to the lighter color, and then put it in a plastic bag – a freezer bag will work for smaller pieces, but for larger works (briefcases and such) you’ll need a trash bag. Fold the excess plastic under the piece to seal it closed and leave it on the table overnight or so. Sometimes it pays off to leave it a full 24 hours. This allows the leather to really soak in that moisture and soften up in preparation for the stamping.
2. Once it has cased for a day the leather should be ready to go to work. Go ahead and pull the piece out, transfer your design and guidelines, and do any carving your design calls for. If the leather dries out too much, dampen it down with a sponge as needed.
3. Now that you’re done carving, it’s time to tape it up. Use a thick, quality tape – the cheap thin stuff shreds when you try to pull it off, and the adhesive is less workable. Make sure the back of the piece is not too damp or wet (it should be mostly dry by this point) and lay your first strip down. Run it over with a glass slicker or a roller to make sure it sticks well, and then continue layering the tape – make sure you overlap a 1/4″ or so on each pass, and continue like this until you have covered the whole piece. A second layer should then be applied crosswise to make sure you’ve pinned it down if both directions.
4. (Optional) If you’re really worried about the stretch or curl, some leather workers have gone an additional step by getting a piece of acrylic plastic 1/4″ thick or thicker, and then rubber cementing the tape-backed leather to the acrylic. The acrylic is hard enough that when placed onto your tooling slab you’ll still get a solid impression and the leather won’t get mushed about as you work it. The tape alone seems to work well for the folks I have read up on. In any case, by now you’re ready for tooling, so get to it.
5. Grab a mallet and go to work, re-dampening the leather as needed. Don’t use too much water, as it will affect the tape. Stick to using a sponge at this point, or a mister. Try to keep your impressions as uniform as possible, and you should get nice clean imprints – the leather has nowhere to go but down at this point.
6. Once you finish the tooling, allow the piece to dry a while and return mostly to the original color before you remove the tape. Turn the project upside-down and pull the tape off of the leather, rather than the other way around to avoid stretching it out after you went through all this. The tape should come off cleanly and leave just a slightly fuzzy nap to the leather.

I’ll be using this method myself on my next couple of projects – I had terrible stretching problems on the smartphone case I made a while back – I ended up re-soaking the leather and leaving it to dry under my slab for almost a week to get it flat again.