tashabear

Just regular 7-8 oz veg tan from Tandy. I may call Froghunter tomorrow and ask him if he's seen it before; it's just way too late/early to bother him with it. So I'm bothering y'all now. :-) I tried rubbing it down with denatured alcohol, because it's beading up like it's greasy. It didn't feel greasy, though, and I'm pretty sure the surface I placed it on was clean and non-greasy. Haven't tried water on it since then, but we'll see. I certainly can't tool it like this, and I bet Eco-Flo dyes will bead up like straight water does. Spirit dyes might work better, so it might be salvageable for something, but I'd like to not have to cut another piece.

Try this: http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/leather/hl.html or this http://tinyurl.com/37wds

I'm making a notebook cover. I just cut out the leather, and went to case it to start tooling the design, and this happened: (Sorry for the blurry photo, but you can see what I need y'all to see well enough.) Parts of it wouldn't absorb the water. This has never happened to me before -- why did it happen now, and how do I fix it? Thanks, folks!

Love the way you did the background! Looks really cool. Nice work!

Ren Faire folks, people into costuming. Tom Swede makes similar ones for the heavy metal scene.

Not all horses will tolerate cruppers; you'll want to find out if her horse will put up with it before you go to the trouble of making one. Suze, that book is 500-700 years post-period for me, so I don't have it. Is the barding in there leather straps like the OP wants, or the horse blanket style like in these pictures?

Is this the sort of thing you're talking about? Because then all you need is a square of leather and a strap long enough to accommodate your cartridges, but you won't know that measurement till you know the caliber. All in all, I'd say that experimentation with cardboard is in order.

Gave 'em all up... except one. You can have my Diet Coke when you unbury my cold, dead body from the pile of empty cans.

I think it's GORGEOUS. How did you do the distressed effect?

WalMart. White gas is Coleman fuel.

This works with business cards, too. (I'm more likely to have business cards handy than breakfast cereal.)

They're hidden between the slots by the rounds. Each round gets a single slot with a bight of leather strap coming up through and around. What I want to know if how you measure for it. I have a project for which this would be useful.

Were you planning on dressing your leather with Vaseline? ;-)

Don't bother. Use inkjet vellum -- little trick I learned from Jim Linnell. It's a lot cheaper, and the vellum is translucent, like the tracing film. Or just print it out on plain paper and cover it with clear packing tape.

Linen has been found in 2000 year old graves; I think that unless you're dressing your leather with kerosene and fire you should be fine.

Check at a fabric store; they sell that sort of thing. Alternately, you might be able to use a clear vinyl shower curtain.

I started on recorder in second grade, when I was about seven. In fifth grade, I switched to flute and played that all through high school in baroque ensemble and concert band, with a brief foray into French horn because the band needed one and I always liked the sound. I continued the flute in college (literally got drafted into the band) and even got a varsity letter for playing in the band. That experience cemented my hatred for Sousa marches, particularly "Stars and Stripes Forever," which persists to this day. (I think old John Philip must have had a very bad experience with woodwinds, because he sure seemed to hate us...) I haven't picked up my flute since college, and I don't even remember how to read music, more's the pity. My husband sings, though, and has been in a couple of bands, so music is still a part of our lives.

I figured that there wasn't *that* much new under the sun as far as purses, but sizes and shapes would change according to fashion, and since I'm new to leatherwork in general, I'm still figuring out what's appropriate for where and when, and where to find the reference works. (If you're looking for clothing or textile references, I'm your girl, though.) I still want to make a moneychanger's purse from Goubitz, though -- it's just NEAT. That being said, where would I look for references on the Hedeby bags? I'm looking for info on Hedeby or Birka, as well as Anglo-Scandinavian York and Viking Dublin.

Essex Custom Leather is in Essex County, Massachusetts. :-)

You can use mylar tracing film (available at Tandy, for one), you can use inkjet vellum (available at Staples), which is a trick I learned from Jim Linnell, or you can use regular paper. Yup, I said it, regular paper. You have to cover it in packing tape, though. :-D

Well, if there isn't going to be a password-locked forum for controversial topics (major opportunity lost, IMO), can we at least ask that people label their posts better? Since there isn't a teaser pop-up when I hover over a topic, I have no idea what I'm in for -- eight times out of ten, the stuff in the off-topic forum is stuff I don't want to read.

Who said anything about anonymously?

That's why I asked Joanna if she could institute a locked section. I don't want to silence people, but I don't want to click on a thread thinking it might be relevant to my interests, only to find that it's really... not. I'm a lot more liberal than most of the folks here, and some of the directions the conversations take make me wicked uncomfortable. And yet I still respect their right to have and air their opinions. I just don't want to look at it or be surprised by it. If you want to eliminate the rancor, the only answer is to eliminate the Off-Topic section and be ruthless about policing the rest of the board. I think that will do more to damage Leatherworker.net than anything else, not to mention creating a LOT of work. It looks like I'm trying to persuade you to my way of thinking, and in a way I am, but I'm mostly responding to you in hopes that someone else might read this and possibly change their way of thinking. Even if we don't get a password-protected anything-goes area, maybe at least they'll think twice before slinging mud in public.

But they're doing it already. Look at the pig pile on that poor kid Noah, or all the political spewing around election time. Since people are going to do it anyway unless there's serious use of the modly hammer, give them a place to do it where the rest of us don't have to look at it.

I have to disagree. They opened a forum like that on a motorcycle forum I'm on and it did nothing but good for the main pages. It's password-protected, like the adult forum is here, which means that I don't even know it's there and I got about my business in blissful ignorance. Of course, that's predicated upon people behaving like adults, which I think can happen here, with suitable applications of modly prerogative where necessary. I'm for it, and would prefer it be password-protected.