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.

Cross-cultural Inspiration and Whacking Leather

It's amazing how sometimes many disparate influences come together.

Colonial Days

Way back in March or April, my daughter's fifth grade class studied American colonial times. The teachers and parents put together an elaborate simulation of "Colonial Williamsburg", complete with tavern, church, government, leatherworking (cobbler), butter-making, and so on.


My part was the leatherworking activity, and of course I chose that one because I had never done leatherworking before! Arranging and participating in the activity was my first try at leatherworking. Fortunately I had lots of excellent help from Andy Stasiak of the local Tandy Leather Factory store--he even taught the kids himself! The kids loved the skunk skin he brought (though most of them wouldn't touch it).


A whole class of kids whacking leather!


That was a really noisy classroom! It was fun, though, and I learned that the mysterious toolset my dad had given me some time before was actually a pretty complete leatherworking set. I didn't do much with it at that point, though, other than play with it a bit.

Mexico and China

In Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries, there is a craft called "papel picado", or "punched paper". Papel picado is created by using punch tools to make designs in multiple layers of brightly colored tissue paper. A few months ago, I was looking at paper picado designs with the goal of replicating them (somewhat) in my tie-dye. While I never managed to get exactly the results I wanted, I learned about another art form, and I did make a couple of fun tie-dyed banners.

Later, when I was visiting Japantown with the middle-schoolers, I bought some books. Besides books on shibori, I bought a book called "Cutting Paper Work of China". Well, it was probably called something else, but it was in Japanese, as was almost all of the text. What little English text there was (on the dust jacket) said that the book covered a folk art called "senshi". Senshi was/is practiced by housewives in China who cut paper into intricate designs of animals, flowers, and so on using scissors and small knives. Many of the designs and motifs struck me as being similar to papel picado, and the designs are fascinating in their own right.

Forward to Today...

All these things come together in my planning to make myself a tooled leather belt to replace yet another flimsy belt that is falling apart (and threatening to let me and my jeans down). Being the perfectionist I am, I want my (first) belt to be perfect, so I started practicing my leatherwork skills on something smaller: keychains/backpack tags/Christmas ornaments.

The first ones were pretty simple. I simply did individual capital letters with a border. I got lettering inspiration from another book, "The Art of Creative Lettering" by Becky Higgins, that I had handy from my scrapbooking days years ago.


Later, I started to branch out into birds and animals. Papel picado and my Chinese paper cutting book gave me ideas (such as the adapted bird on the branch, below), and I browsed the Internet for pictures of kittens and other creatures. I found pictures of peacocks in their full glory at http://www.peafowl.org (I had no idea there were so many types of peafowl!). The flower design in the upper right corner came from a Tandy pattern.


Tooling the Leather

There is a specific sequence for a lot of decorative leather tooling. First, you draw the pattern on paper, then dampen the leather (called "casing the leather") and trace the lines with a stylus (kind of like a ball-point pen with no ink). That gives the design on the leather like this kitten below (the lighter lines are where I used the stylus directly on the leather instead of through the paper).


You cut along the lines using a special leather cutting swivel knife (right, below). Beveling along the cut edge with a beveling tool (left, below) and a mallet gives the picture definition (see above and below the paws, and in the ears for beveling).


I used various stamping tools to refine the picture, adding stars to the pillow, and so on.


I used the knife again to make little cuts for the whiskers at the very end.

How About Some Color?

I also added color to several pieces. I used Tandy's Eco-Flo All-in-One finishes to both color and protect the pieces. In the picture below, I colored all four. The J, A, and M are all using the same Mariner Blue color, but I have rubbed the M with a piece of an old cotton dishtowel to make it shiny.


For the A in the following picture, I have rubbed the left side only. The All-in-One works really well--it only takes about 4-6 strokes with the cloth to get the leather shiny! I do more strokes to get the piece as shiny as possible all over.


For scale, the leather pieces I'm using are all about 2.5 inches tall.

Here are some pieces that I painted more elaborately with various colors of the All-in-One.

Diluting the paints gives a whole new range of possibilities.


Ooh, Ooh, Me Too!

My kids decided the leatherwork looked like to much fun to let me do it undisturbed. They jumped right in, putting their own spin on letters and other designs. My younger daughter found a dolphin design in a coloring book, and adapted it with her own ideas. She did two of those plus several others.


My older daughter did both pictorial pieces and geometric pattern pieces, though she wasn't interested in painting them:

We even had a couple of my older daughter's friends over to do some. They had a blast (and I thought the ringing in my ears would never go away!).

Gratuitous Dog Pictures

Lacey didn't get much chance to help out on these little projects, but I thought she could model some of them.

I think maybe it's just a bit overmuch on the bling, dahling!


To Be Continued at Some Point...

I'm having so much fun with my little keychains that it will probably take me a while to get around to doing the belt I'm planning (and there is still that jeans circle quilt languishing on the sewing machine). It's just so much fun to create all these little miniature works of art!