Cjrademaker

I make tooled desk blotters, fairly simple, single piece of veg tan with a tooled border. I am having trouble getting them to lay flat on their own, sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't and there is a little bump raised off the desks, presumably from slight stretching while tooling. I'm thinking I just need to start adding some sort of rigid backing. Anyone do anything like this? Thoughts on materials that would attach well and last? I would like to just do two pieces of leather but I do not want to double the materials cost. That would make them prohibitively expensive. Id like to keep it as a single piece if anyone has any suggestions on how to get the leather to behave without a backing. More detailed notes on process for the curious, 8/9 oz herman oak Cut to size and ensure squareness Wet with a wide mist spray bottle Mark, swivel, bevel, tool border Bevel and sand edges Dry Oil Stain with Feibings Antiques Dry Burnish Edges Put between two heavy flat things for as long as turnaround times allow. Airbrush clearcoat Put between two heavy flat things again if i've got time Remove from heavy flat things and be frustrated by that slight but persistent bump along the edges.

How to you manage the humidity in your shop? I do a lot of vegtan tooling and shaping so I've always got projects drying. I have noticed that as my production volume has increased the leather has begun to dry noticeably slower. This makes sense of course as more projects means significantly more water trying to evaporate into the same amount of air. The obvious answer would be to add a dehumidifier, but I dont want to find myself over drying the leather by mistake, either the projects in progress or my hides in storage. I used to work at a tandy so I've seen some once beautiful hides turn into an almost unworkable dry sheet, I would hate to do this to my stocks. Anyone got a number for a good target humidity? Might adding more airflow over the drying area be enough? I'll be experimenting with a few things in the coming weeks of course but I wonder if anyone has wrestled with this issue before.

Good to know, I had only seen the inkjet products before. I will take a look around

I do all of my design in illustrator so they start digital, printing would be the obvious choice but my printer is a laser so the inkjet sheets will not work for me. From what I have found, Gel pens like the pilot G-2's smear Liquid ink pens like pilot V-5's smear terribly Every kind of sharpie I have tried smears as well, both ultra fine and regular Standard ballpoints do not smear but the inkflow is unreliable Maybe I just need to find a really high quallity ballpoint with better inkflow in general.

Hey Everybody, I have been experimenting more and more with transfer film and hand carving. As I get to doing more complex designs I am always frustrated by the difficulty of getting good clean lines on the stuff. From what I have figured out though trial and error a light touch with the pen goes a long way as does keeping the pen more vertical than when writing on standard paper. Has anyone found any pens that work particularly well writing on transfer film? i.e. marks reliably, clearly, and does not smudge. Or maybe the inverse, are there better transfer materials available than the film I am buying from tandy?

After doing all that talking about vinegaroon, I thought I would start a page about it. https://leathercraft.wikispaces.com/Vinegaroon Take a look at it, correct me where I am wrong, add your two cents.

I do not believe they are redundant, both methods have distinct advantage and disadvantages. While it is true that this site is a wonderful source, there are lots of things that this, or any forum is simply no good at. Search in forums is always choppy at best, there are some terms that become so commonly used in discussion that they become useless to use as search terms. A forum is ideal for things like critiques, feedback, opinion and advice questions, and of course sharing your work with the community. The strength of a forum as a medium is conversation. There are some things however that it is quite bad at. There is some information that is just really hard to find though a forum search. Yes, the information is already here, but it buried between lots of back and fourth and conversation to dig though. It might be that the information you needed was on the fourth page of a thread and you gave up on the third page. Perhaps the thread which had the information you needed was under a title like "Need Help," which would give you no indication that this was a place where you would find what you need. The advantage of the wiki is organziation of the information and the repeated reviewing and revising of information. A wiki is easy to search for exactly what you need, whenever you need it. Because these are articles, not conversations, the information is presented in a much more complete and organzied way. Wikis are great for exploring though topics, clicking through from linked article to linked article with each step being a series of complete and distinct thoughts. Vinegaroon is great example of this. If you search leatherworker.net for the term "vinegaroon," you will find threads about people using vinegaroon, people suggesting others use vinegaroon, people asking if their batch looks okay, threads of people picking up in the middle of the vinegaroon process and asking about how the rinsing works, threads for questions that never got answerd and finally (not on the first page of the search results by the way) you will find threads about how to make the stuff. On a leather wiki that has been developed by the community for a sufficiently long time if you search vinegaroon, without fail the first article will be the "vinegaroon" article which will have all the information in one, well organized place with links to related topics to explore such as other natural dyes.

Hey guys, I have a post with a similar goal going in the Resources forum. I am starting a leathercrafting wiki that I think would serve this purpose very well. Like Wikipedia, it is set up so that anyone here can edit it. I am working on roping in some people from the leathercrafting forum on reddit to help as well. You can find the very beginings of it here: https://leathercraft.wikispaces.com/ She is not much to look at right now, but with the help of the online community we should be able to pull something fantastic together. Right now I am working on articles on all the tools I can list. That should be a good place to start for anyone who needs a foot in the door. Pick a tool, search for it, and if nothing pops up, write about it. Eventually I want to expend it to include information on tools, techniques, suppliers, styles, patterns, outside resources, anything and everything useful in one, well organized, easily searchable, easily expandable resource. If anyone wants to help there are a lot of areas to work in. Even if you feel that you do not have the knowledge to contribute content, if this is a resource you would like to see realized we can use your help in editing for clarity of language and consistancy of style, in tracking down photographs, and a number of other things I haven't thought about yet. If you feel like you have the knowledge to write content but are not comfortable with the process of writing with h3's and anchor links and all that technical jargon, that is why we have editors. Just write what you know and someone else will make sure it displays correctly. If you anybody was particularly inspired by any of that I have set up an email for coordinating the project, you can reach me there at wiki@wizenedoakleather.com

https://leathercraft.wikispaces.com/ I figured this would end up being a learning experience. You are right, a new link was needed. The link in this post goes to the wiki, the link in my first post will take you to the members sign up page. Each article page has a discusson page as Thor mentioned, traditionally those pages are used for discussions about proposed revisions to the page rather than a place to ask questions and get answers. Forums like this one are much better set up for that purpose and already have the community to back them up.

I did not realize it was still set to private, that has been updated now. Like wikipedia it is now available for anyone to view and update. If you are intimidated by the formatting h3, h4, anchor links, all of that, do not worry about it. I have roped the reddit leatherworking comminity to do some editing for us. If you want to contribute, write whatever you feel you want to share. Just click on the "Pages and Files" button on the right sidebar and hit "New Page," Give it a name, and just write down everything you know about it. Right now I am getting started by writing articles about the basic tools. If anyone wants to join in on that it would be an easy place to start.

Hey everybody. I have been a leathercraftsman for several years now and a professional for a little under a year now. Outside of crafting, leathercraft education has always been something I am very interested in and it is always wonderful to find places like this online where there are good folks like yourselves sharing in a common interest. I am almost entirely self taught and the internet was always the first resource I looked to. As I am sure we have all noticed, the free resources available are surprisingly sparse and of entirely variable quality. Tutorials are all over the board in terms of quality, forums like this one are great if you have a specific question but searching them can be like finding a needle in a hay stack at times and most leather forums lack the traffic necessary to get quick answers. I want to create the resource that I wanted when I was first learning and a wiki seems like a fantastic way to do that. I am getting a wikispace set up now and if it turns into more than a disparate handful of articles I will purchase a professional account and with the help of folks like yourself, turn it into something that anyone starting out can use and learn from from the most basic, to the most advanced. If any of you think this is worth doing I would love to get your input. Click the link below to join the wiki and start contributing. The first thing I will be doing it writing articles about every tool that I can think of. https://wikispaces.com/join/49F79CP If anyone is particularly interested and wants to start getting organized about it or needs some information about how to create pages, send me a message. I look forward to working with you.

That's mostly just a part of life with leather. The ends generally won't be as nice as the center. If it is stiff and has creases, when it gets to you, they are not going to come out. You can attempt to incorporate them and sometimes you will have some success but I find more often than not it isn't worth it, that leather will be have imperfections that will cause problems. Its like knots in wood, the leather will be hard to cut, won't accept dye as well and could lead to irregularities in the finish if you are dying it. The tooling will be more shallow in that area if you are doing that. Its really just more mess than it is worth. You can save a bit of leather there but if incorperating one faulty part causes the larger project to get scraped in the end, you just wasted a whole lot more time, effort, and material than you would have saved.

So I have tracked down the rest of the numbers they are a singer 211w145 and a singer 511w145. I will be looking into them on my own, but if anybody with experience with either machine feels like giving me their opinion on them I sure would appreciate it. Thanks for the help so far.

Hello, I have always been a hand stitcher, but I know an upholsterer who has two leather sewing machines he is looking to get rid of, a Singer 211W that will need to be converted from neumatic to electric before I could use it and a singer 511W that is already on electric. I currently know nothing about sewing machines. I am told both are in fine shape, he just needed something different. I work primarily in vegetable tanned leather. If one of those machines could pull it off I would love to sew belts, wallets, maybe some bags one day. It turns out information on this kind of machine is not easy to find, if someone here has some, I would greatly appreciate the insite. Or if you need more information to know for sure, let me know that as well. In short, could a singer 211w or a 511w handle heavy vegtan? lighter vegtan? Thanks