Leerwerker

Are talking about a round braid, Rob?

You'll recognize the hat!

Hi Joe, Your work is very inspiring! I once sat down and over a few days made some thirty armbands - I just liked to progress from one design to the next. It was a very nice excercise. You can see some of the results on my blog at http://www.johan-potgieter.com/leatherblog...9/armbands.html Here is a link to the whole BLOG

I use two wood boards to roll my round braiding - I made these covers for the wood so that they at least look like something. And I bought a kayak last year - I am crazy about paddling ...

Show us what the effect is that you are trying to achieve ...

The biggest advantage of .pdf's are that you can transport images and documents from one computer to the next and this document will always print the way the creator of it intended. In the old days you would create a doc in WordPerfect and then someone in MS Word had to reformat the whole thing if they did not have the same printer or fonts as on the original machine ...

I use Inkscape to get designs off photos and now I have discovered that I can put them in a .pdf and send them to Office Max to print them for me any size as long as the width do not exceed 24". JOhan

Thanks Oscar! Tom, I am very interested in the "closing mechanism" of that sporran of your dad's! Some one asked me about sporrans and said he wanted to make one, but he did not have the hardware for the closure at the top. What he described, sounded very much like what I see on that photo. Can you photograph or describe how that sporran closes? JOhan

I am looking for sporran patterns, please!

I don't believe paying too much for a swivel knife is worth it - In my opinion the barrel has to be thick so that my hand does not cramp up too much - and a nice length is good. But ball bearings in the swivel of the yoke and all that - a bit of a joke - while you cut, there is no need for the yoke to spin at 20,000 per second like the makers always demonstrate! What most people seem to forget is the very crucial working end of the knife -the blade! THAT has to be a nice hard steel or ceramic, but unless you keep it stropped, even a $1,000 blade will help you nothing ... Have your rouge handy next to you when you cut, and even the $12.00 Swivel knife will give excellent results!

Someone told me Will Gormly swears by ONLY extra virgin coldpress olive oil for his gun holsters (look at his patterns at a Tandy store ...). Any plant or animal oil can be used on leather, as long as it is used sparingly. I have doused a piece of leather before in cod liver oil and the smell of fish lasted no more than an hour or two and then it changed into the very traditional "new leather smell". I did that to test it because I used cod liver oil in my own dubbin that I make of sheep fat. I think the closest product to Dubbin that we have in America, is Dr Jackson's Hide Rejuvenator! It is close to the old non-mineral Dubbin. I have written some about finishes at www.leatherlearn.com

On the last point I suppose I just need to advertise my web pages more and that should send some traffic there ....

I attended a class by Alex Ortega, and after we cast our own faces, we made our final molds from something called "Densite" (spelling unknown). Very very hard dense plaster that takes the repeated brass hammer blows to shape the mask.

This was a cover I made when asked to have an eagle with open wings on the cover. Not easy when you start looking at designs - the cover is too small to have a sensible pic of an eagle on it. Plus I had to have the wording on as well. So I cheated and only put half an eagle on. And it worked, I asked my friend a while ago what I put on his dad's Bible Cover, and he remembered an eagle with both wings spread and both visible ....

I have a few pointers on my blog at www.leatherlearn.com Look on the right hand side and pick the Dye and Finishes category ...

I did it just like doing a pencil drawing. First did the outlines and then bring in the shading.

Do yourself a favor and try the new Royal Meadow leather from Tandy - simply the BEST!

Some months ago I was asked to rescue two prayerbooks by a very dear old nun, Sr Rosalind. I decided to try to copy the images on the front covers on to the leather by treating them as pencil drawings and doing them in burning. I never took photos of the finished covers - they were also glued on like the Bible cover I showed so that they would keep the books together. The old paperback covers had disintegrated.

A member of our guild got a letter from Hidecrafters to ask if they owe him any money - some story about bankruptcy - is George Hurst retiring completely or what is their latest status in a nutshell?

Regis, I mounted a huge carving recently and made the wood backing smaller than the carving by about 1/4" That way the leather hangs slightly away from the wall and you do not see the wood - it really has a nice effect.

LOL - When I put the word dye in 'dye' quotes, the one chemist guy did not see the tongue in cheek quotes! Of course I know it's not real dye, but he had to point that out to me! I would want to caution on the side of acidity, but I must also admit that even my college chemistry is now getting to be more that three decades old ....!

Here's how I see the sequence: 1. Dye, resist and antique the tooled side of the leather. 2. Dampen and slick down the edges. 3. Apply dye to the edges, and then seal the edges together with the grainside with a conditioner or whatever; or Apply Gum Tragacanth to the edge, slick down again and then coat with Edge Coat (a sliver of an old hard peice of sponge clamped in a clothes peg works great) and then seal the grainside with whatever ....

You can see the braided thread at http://www.tandyleatherfactory.com/product...=259&Page=2 look at the bottom of the page, any of the items starting with 11210-

Here are some answers I got from the leather chemists when I asked them about this method of coloring leather: 1. The black color is the reaction of Ferric salts or oxide with tannings, nice formula for leather crafts, but it is a pain in the neck in vegetable tannery. 2. First: this is not a dye is an iron (ferric) salt. Second: The leather may be damaged by the excess of acid: white vinegar is acetic acid and if applied in excess can give some problem according to what was stated in the post. Iron react with vegetable tannins giving a product that is black. Neutralizing the leather is not wrong. In the industrial process this is also being used even though the term is confusing because it does not mean to take the leather up to the neutral pH condition or the 7.0 value. It means to neutralize some of the acid inside the leather to avoid acid damage. The final pH for vegetable leather can be around 4.0 and this is far from neutral. 3. The process is sometimes used to make black leather through a process called striking. In fact, I believe there is a commerical product called Striker. David used the process commercially back in Colombia. I still have the black leather hat that he gave me from this type of leather. 4. You are right, I also used them in Colombia in order to save some money on dyes,on heavy veg retannage we used ferrous sulphate to create a nice black color all thru the cut replacing the expensive colored veg extracts "unitones". Other strikers used were copper sulphate, ferric chloride and titanium potasium oxalate ( for brown shades) an adittional advantage was the capacity of strykers to mordent the dyes uniform on veg retan or veg leather making a little better "coverage" if the word is correct of the defects as scratches, at least they were less evident. Limitation obviously was the necessity of veg extracts to create the complete system. SO, it seems the best pH for leather is 4 - quite acid! Hope this helps! JOhan

Pet, The design was put on by free-hand stamping (called leather carving, in America, even though nothing is carved out, but some parts of the leather is pounded down deeper, same as what you probably do with your ball pointed tool). Does anybody have a link to a web page that shows simple leather carving that we can point Pet to? JOhan