Black, Baby, Black!

I've been experimenting with black and gray dyes recently. I used Better Black, New Black, Charcoal Gray, and Black Cherry (okay, that's more of a dark red), all Procion dyes from Dharma. I made them up in various concentrations, starting with "1" strength as the formula recommended on the Dharma site: 2 to 8 teaspoons (10-40 ml) and 1 tablespoon (15ml) urea per 1 cup of water for the Procion dyes. The blacks needed 8 teaspoons each, while the charcoal gray only needed 2 teaspoons. The black cherry took 4 teaspoons of dye per cup.

I then mixed up "1/4", "1/8", and "1/16" dilutions of those dyes by adding more urea-water to the appropriate amounts of the "1" solutions.

I also mixed up one teaspoon of sodium alginate thickener in one cup of water (stirring and letting it stand overnight). When completely dissolved, it was about the consistency of molasses or honey. I put about 4 teaspoons of thickener mixture into each cup of dye at the various strengths. That proportion is a little rougher, since I wasn't extremely exact on those measurements of the thickener!

I marked up an old white shirt with permanent marker, soaked it in soda ash, then dripped on small amounts of each solution. Here is the shirt still wet, just after dyeing. You can see the blue edges on some of the spots where the dyes separate. It's even worse without the thickener. I tried again in the lower right corner after doubling the amount of thickener in the solutions (for "1/4" strength dyes).

Here is the same shirt after sitting overnight, then washing and drying. It looks like a chromatography experiment with all the bleeding and color separation!

If I need to do anything sharply black, I'll have to add a lot more thickener in the future. However, I really love the bleed effects and I like to use them intentionally to get all sorts of subtle shadings.

Time to Dye

This isn't my usual palette of blues, greens, and purples, but once I had all those different solutions mixed up, I had to use them, right?

Here is a "Moonlight Sonata" crop top done with a repurposed United Colors of Benetton shirt. I love the word "repurposed". It's like a "pre-owned" car. It sounds so much better than "used" or "thrift shop"! It even sounds better than "recycled", even if it's a little slower rolling off the tongue. I stitched the moon with dental floss and covered it with the repurposed thumbtip of a used rubber glove secured by the floss ends. No, the dental floss wasn't "used", though I guess using it for something other than teeth counts as "repurposed"!

I only did the moon on the front layer of the shirt.

Long "Moonlight Sonata" shirts: I made two of these, different sizes, opposite designs. You see the back of the left one and the front of the right (the front has ties at the neck). These shirt blanks are new from Dharma: Light Jersey Extended Sleeve shirts.

They are REALLY thin shirts, but I rather like the results. I'll have to get some more of these. They'll be good for high-resolution geometric designs.

I call these my "Three Sisters" shirts. I love the subtle shades. I used all the various blacks, grays, and the "black cherry" color. The shirts are cotton-spandex shirts from Justice, a chain store catering to pre-teens. I happened to pass by it one day and plain (white) shirts were on sale. I nearly cleaned out their supply! The "Two Sisters" (my kids), immediately ran off with them.

Here's a cotton bandana. It was folded, tied, soaked in soda ash and then let dry completely before dyeing.

I'm pretty happy with the results of my experiment. I might just have to use blacks more often!

Shoe Mania, Part 3: Sandal Pieces, Unite!

Now that I had dyed and put together the uppers for my sandals, I wanted to add some padding between the soles before I put the soles together. I got some foam rubber meant for insoles that had a tan knit fabric covering on one side (Ortho Sponge Top-Cover ordered from Louis Birns & Sons). I'll get it without the fabric for next time, but this will be fine for now.

I cut out 3/4-length pieces for each foot, plus extra pieces for a second layer at the heel.


First, I glued the heel layer to the sole layer of padding. I also marked where the sandal straps will go relative to the padding.


Since the straps are all supposed to be adjustable, they need to be able to slide across the sole, so I was careful to avoid putting any contact cement where the straps will be. I'm now ready to glue the padding to the upper sole. Note that the extra layer of padding at the heel will butt right up against the strap there.



The fabric side of the foam rubber did not glue well, so it required multiple coats of the contact cement before gluing to the other piece.

Also, once I had it glued together, there wasn't enough leather to form a good bond around the padding. I pulled it back apart, trimmed the padding to be narrower, and glued it back together.


Nailing the Soles

Since I had this romantic vision of shoemakers nailing shoes together, I wanted to try that myself. Finding the right type of nails turned out to be problematic, though, since normal people don't use shoemaker's nails. There are also quite a few different types of shoemaker's nails. The instructions I was following in the "Sandal Making" book just said "Sole Nails", which turns out to be not quite the right terminology.

I ended up getting "wire clinch nails" from Louis Birns. And of course, I needed to learn yet another measurement convention. It seems that for wire clinch nails, the sizes are noted as 4/8, 5/8, 6/8, 7/8, and 8/8, where 8/8 is a nail an inch long, and 4/8 is half an inch. The trick, though, is that the tip of the nail is meant to bend over when it strikes the anvil, thus locking the nail into the leather sole. So an 8/8 nail is meant to secure a sole that is just less than an inch thick.

I used 5/8 for the main sole and 7/8 for the heel. Here you can see that the nails on the sole poke through quite a bit and bend way over--they are too long for this thickness of sole. These nails would really mess up a nice hardwood floor.

If you look closely you can see the U shape of the nails poking out from the soles--not the desired effect.

Non-slip Soling

I got a sheet of SoleTech 3.5 soling material from Louis Birns. This is pretty thin rubbery material with a slight texture to make the soles less slippery.

Here are the SoleTech pieces I cut. I don't plan to have the rubber come up over the point of the shoes, so it is cut short at the toes.


I glued on the SoleTech with more contact cement. I also dyed the edges of the sandals blue and treated them with Lexol and carnauba creme as I did with the upper soles and straps.

Here are the finished sandals. Yay! I've finished my first pair!


Thoughts for Next Time

Nails: The 7/8 wire clinch nails I used around the heels worked fine, but the 5/8 nails I used for the much thinner sole section were too long. This caused them to form raised "U" shapes on the surface of the sole when they bent over, instead of having just the tip bending flat back into the sole.

Bottom sole surfacing: I had some trouble with having the SoleTech sheet peeling off the sandals, particularly where the nails stuck up from the leather sole, causing about a square centimeter of the SoleTech to not adhere well to the leather sole with the contact cement. I had to redo the sole piece for one sandal, partly because I had cut it a little small, and a couple of nails stuck out right at the edge, aggravating the peeling problem. The second time I cut the SoleTech piece a little larger than the sole, and I trimmed off the excess with a knife after gluing. That worked much better. I think trimming the rubber to the sole also helps avoid creating a place where the rubber can catch on something and be pulled off. Later, though, I plan to try some different soling materials. This SoleTech 3.5 is really too thin and fragile for the sandals I'm making, and it's wearing through much too quickly.

Cement: It also seemed that the contact cement wasn't strong enough (except for its smell!) for gluing the rubber to the leather, though it was fine for the leather-to-leather bond. One of the guys at the leather store suggested using multiple coats of the cement on each side before putting them together. I tried multiple coats later, and it helped (though at that later point I was also using the new Barge formula of Tandy's contact cement, which may have worked better, though it smelled even worse than the previous cement).

The Lure of Leather

This is the piece of thick "saddle skirting" leather I used for my soles. It was an entire side before I started cutting it, and it takes up most of my kitchen floor.


Once in a while I get way too much help! Both my younger daughter and Lacey think this is just the place to plop down for a bit...


And, of course, they want some sandals too!

Shoe Mania, Part 2: Strappy Uppers

In my previous sandal-making post, I cut and formed the soles and heels of my new sandals. During the time I was waiting for those to dry, I started working on the uppers of the sandals. I started by preparing the straps.

The buckles I was using required a size #6 hole for the buckle tongues. I thought I'd try to save some time later by preparing the strap ends with holes and points ahead of time, as shown in the picture. It turned out that it made the fitting a little bit harder, so I won't do it that way again. It's easier to make the holes and such later than it is to correctly position the buckle later.

I used a half-inch oblong punch (also known as a bag punch or oval punch) to make the holes for my straps. I had put my foot on the upper sole to mark the hole locations. I find the punches to be kind of slippery and hard to hold, so I put the rubber bands on to improve the grip. It didn't help much, unfortunately.

Here I tried putting the straps in place, and the whole thing is held together with more rubber bands (if I had to be stranded on a desert island, I'd want a big bag of rubber bands with me).

Here is how the straps look from under the upper sole. You can imagine that these fairly thick straps might be a bit uncomfortable to walk on, since you would feel them as lumps through the upper sole.

One way to deal with the lumpy strap problem is suggested in the Sandal Making book: use a scarier-looking version of a man's razor, called a skiver (in this case a "Super Skiver"), to carefully scrape off enough thickness from the upper sole so that the straps nestle into the sole. Depending on the thicknesses of the straps and the sole, this approach varies in its success.

One thing I found is that the skiver takes a lot of practice to use, and it's a bit like using a potato peeler. The amount of material you take off in one swipe depends on the angle of the handle relative to the leather surface. It's really easy to dig right into your leather and cut off more than you intended. On the other hand, if you stay timid, you'll take a lot of time and not get deep enough. Practice, practice, practice.

Another approach, which I didn't do on this pair of sandals (guess what's coming in a future blog), is to skive the upper sole, the lower sole, and the straps. That doesn't work for all cases, though, such as where the straps are adjustable and you may later expose a part of the strap that was initially covered.

Dyeing

The next step is to dye the various pieces before assembly. Similar to how I finished my third belt, I dyed them all with Tandy's Leather Dye, cleaned them with Lexol, and finished them with a layer of Tandy's Carnauba Creme. I dyed the entire length of each strap (both sides) since the adjustable straps will be able to slide through the shoe--I don't know for certain what parts will show, and it may change over time.


Here is how buffing affects the look of the Carnauba Creme. The lower piece in the picture has been buffed with a cloth and is nice and shiny. There are some white flecks of wax on the upper piece.


I couldn't resist putting the shoes back together with the rubber bands to see how they looked at this point:


Hardware

Adding the hardware, the buckles and rivets, was one of the more satisfying stages for me. This is when things started to look really cool and shiny.

Since I hadn't done buckles before, I had to play with getting the size and location of the slot correct on the strap. I tried my half-inch and three-quarter-inch punches, as well as punching two small holes and using a knife to cut out the leather between them (second hole from the right).


The three-quarter-inch punch worked the best for my half-inch sandal buckles.


Here you can see the slot for the buckle and the corresponding holes for the rivet that holds the buckle onto the strap:


Here are the uppers with buckles and rivets, all ready for the final assembly to the lower soles.


To be continued....

Belting it Out

Like any craft, leatherwork requires a lot of learning and practice to get good at it. And like the true dilettante that I am, I'm going to work really hard at it, and collect all the tools and supplies for it, until I'm pretty good (but not great) at it--just good enough to prove to myself that I can do it--and then move on to something else. After all, I always need more stuff to stuff into my craft room, right?

In any case, I had a great time doing the leather keychains, and they made good test pieces as well as great little holiday gifts. But once the holidays were over, it was time to move on, and I'm still avoiding working on my jeans circle quilt.

It was time for... the belt.

The Pattern

I've always liked Celtic knot and chain patterns, and I also wanted to do kind of a sampler to show off various basketweave patterns and designs. I found a chain design on the web, then copied a part of it and modified it on my computer using the drawing program in Sun's OpenOffice.org software. I'm pretty fond of that drawing program--it's great for repeating and resizing patterns and motifs--and best of all, it's free!

I put various sizes and shapes of the design on a single sheet and printed it out. I got a 1.5-inch-wide belt blank from Tandy to start with, then used the one design strip that fit best on my belt.


I wet the leather of the belt and used a creasing tool to press in straight lines a quarter inch in from each long edge of the belt. Then I traced the chain design into the leather using a ball-point stylus. I repeated the design as needed, then ended the design by making the big chain openings into loops. The idea was to have the design end on either side of the buckle and billet (the piece with the holes) sections.

Once I traced the design, I used the swivel knife to cut the entire design, then used a beveling tool to stamp down along the outer edge of the design. The following picture shows the belt after this first beveling.


From there, I used various stamping tools to fill in each of the large chain spaces with different patterns.


The dark spots on the right end of the picture above are the snaps that hold the buckle. The buckle tongue goes through the cut slot, and the end folds over to snap in the back of the belt. The plain part of the belt on the left end will be the billet, where I'll punch the holes.

I got to the point in the picture above, then tried on the belt to figure out exactly where to punch the holes. I had measured my old belt before starting the new one, but I found I had made a tactical error when I traced the pattern: the patterned section was too long, and the belt would be too big for me unless I put holes into the pattern! Ouch.

Well, my hubby won the leather lottery this time, since his waist is a bit bigger than mine. He wanted the belt to be dark brown (what? not purple??), so I coated the belt with the All-in-One and handed it over.


I had another belt blank handy, so I did the whole thing again, with one fewer chain link repeat this time! I did different patterns in some of the big loops too, and then dyed my belt blue. This time my belt fit. I spent about 8 hours on each belt--leatherworking requires a great deal of patience!


Learning Curve

I've been taking my work in to my local Tandy store for critiquing and advice. As I mentioned, there is a lot to learn. The two main helpful comments I've gotten have been to keep my swivel knife blades sharper and to keep my leather wetter as I work it.

The too-dull blades show up as (relatively) ragged-edged cuts, because they drag the leather along instead of slicing through it like, well, a knife! Rob at Tandy told me that while I was polishing the blade just fine with jeweler's rouge, the blades needed more drastic sharpening first. For this, I needed to drag the blades on a flat piece of 600-grit sandpaper (which I finally found in the automotive section of my local hardware store).

Keeping the leather at the right wetness, or casing the leather, affects how deep the stamping tool impressions go. If you want your pattern to appear in sharp relief (yes, you probably do), then you need the leather to be wet all the way through--but not too wet. If it's too dry, the leather is hard, and the tool only leaves its impression on the very surface. Too wet, and the leather just kind of moves around like soft clay or putty, and doesn't compress enough to hold the pattern well. Books suggest keeping your work damp in a plastic bag overnight, but you have to be careful to not let the work get mildewed! Yum.

I also learned that, while the All-in-One is really easy to use and gets great colors, it's really not the right choice for leather that will get a lot of bending and wear. Since it is both a dye and a finish, it doesn't penetrate very deeply, and it tends to crack a bit when the leather is bent or scraped (the billet section, for example, where it goes through the buckle).

Here you can see the finish cracking a bit on the back side of my blue belt (as well as how the snaps work with the buckle and the keeper, which is a separate loop of leather).


The All-in-One was great for the keychains, though, which don't get the same type of abuse as a belt. For my belt, the cracking is only visible when I'm looking at the back, so no big deal. I can always touch it up a little if I need to. For future belts I'll use separate dyes and finishes, though.

One more thing: half the fun of making belts is choosing the buckle. These are from Tandy.


His and Hers belts. Aaaw, too cute...


More to Come

And speaking of future belts, obviously I need to do at least one more so I can experiment with dyes! So I've already started the next one, but that's a topic for another blog.

Paint it Black, Part 2

Starting With Black

My latest effort has been trying out discharge dyeing on black shirts. This was pretty successful in my dyeing class, but I didn't get a chance to do it myself on the black shirts. So now that the class is over, it's my turn!

I took several black shirts of various sizes and brands (or at least models) and did them the way I'm used to doing shirts: in my favorite tie-dye patterns. I did a couple in the spiral tie (one as a "spiral", the other as "rays" or "sunburst"), one in my favorite V pattern, a crinkle, and one shibori-style just smooshed up (technical term) diagonally and tied.

I experimented a bit with the thickness of the Soft Scrub With Bleach. I was mostly using up the partially-filled squeeze bottles of Soft Scrub that I had left over from my class--I hate to waste anything, but it was time to start reclaiming my squeeze bottles.

Here is the "rays" shirt. I coated it thickly on one side.

On the other side, I added a little water to what was left in the bottle, shook it up, and squirted that over the whole second side. Note the little blobs of thicker Soft Scrub in places.


Here is the "rays" shirt with the thickly-coated side. Note the bright lines.


Here is the side coated with diluted Soft Scrub.


For the crinkle shirt, I coated one side in a thin layer of Soft Scrub by rubbing it in the puddle of drips from a different shirt (no waste!). Then I emptied another small squirt bottle onto it to make the web of white lines you see here:

Here is the side where I put the extra lines of thicker Soft Scrub. You can see brighter spots within the darker orange sections.

The second side has a more uniform effect.


This is the "spirals" shirt. I did thick layers on both sides, but I did not do the two narrow stripes on the other side.

With narrow stripes:

and without:

I put on thick bands of Soft Scrub on both sides of the folded V shirt.



Here is the first side of the V shirt.


And here is the second side. Not exactly what I had expected, but I had expected the Soft Scrub to penetrate more than just the single layer. It hardly penetrates at all beyond the first layer (just enough to make it look like a mistake).



For the "smooshed" shirt, I tied it pretty loosely, and pretty much used it to mop up all the remaining Soft Scrub dribbles on my table.


Here is the result. It had a thin layer of Soft Scrub, so it didn't bleach very strongly. Interestingly, though, it bleached to almost a heathery orange-grey, not to orange like the other shirts. Both this and the crinkle shirt are Fruit of the Loom Lofteez shirts, though the crinkle is a Medium and the other is a Small. 

Trying Again

I really liked how the shirts came out, but I thought all but one (the spiral) needed, well, more.  So I tied four of them back up again and redid them.

For the V, I refolded it the reverse way I had folded it before so I would get a design in the center of the plain back.


The shibori shirt just got more of the same:

For the rays shirt, I bleached it the opposite way (diluted, full-strength) so both sides now have both dark and light sections:

And I did something similar for the crinkle to give it more depth, though it ended up quite different from front to back. 

Front:

So I think once again I've failed  in producing something boring enough for my "I'd die rather than wear tie-dye" friends, because these turned out pretty interesting (aside from their rather limited color palette).  

Oh well, back to the lab again...