medievalbard

These look amazing! I’ll definitely try this method with my next round of belts.

To be honest, no. I’ve learned that the best way to go about stamping/forming leather is soaking it in water(tap in my case) for a few hours or overnight. This has worked just fine for me up to now, but if tempering is easier or better, I’d love to learn how!

Interesting! Metal contamination hadn’t even occurred to me. I use an arbor press for repeated stamps on some of my straps/belts, and the side of the wet form that had the specs was a side with a bare steel clamp, so that could definitely be it. Thank you all so much!

I know this has been asked thousands of times, but bear with me. I recently bought a very large undyed unfinished double butt piece of leather from Tandy. I usually work with pre-dyed, prefinished leathers, but I figured I’d take a risk and learn how to die and finish leather myself. However, an unexpected issue that has risen is that before I can even get to finishing/dying, mildew/mold begins to form on the belt on both sides, very soon after I finish stamping a design(I’m talking under an hour). What on earth do I do to make sure this doesn’t happen? This also happened with the same leather when I attempted to wet form leather around an AirPods case and when I clamped a piece of leather to make a key tray. The mold in question is little black spots, that don’t smell or feel strange, but are definitely very noticeable. Could it be because I soaked the leather overnight? I usually only soak it for an hour or two, but I had some extra time so I wanted to see if it’d make a difference. My basement is fairly low humidity, and I have a dehumidifier running constantly set to about 45%. I tried rubbing it with diluted alcohol, but that had little to no effect. I’d appreciate any and all ideas!