PigasusStudio

Nice :0)

Thanks and {lol} yeah well they'd have to get past the hand or the armpit first as well.

Wuuu, first clutch done and going up on Etsy in the next few days! It's my first product completed (though I do have about 60 bracelet buds waiting to be finished!). Here's hoping someone out there will like it enough to buy it. Will also be selling a do-it-yourself template for those who might want to, well, do it themselves. I learned quite a bit in making the template w/ instructions file. And so glad I did that and printed out copies along the way and made it up in paper, 'cause there were a lot of changes to the original idea before and many lessons learned before the end! Of course, I can see all the flaws, but overall I'm happy with how it turned out and though there were many changes I think the spirit of the original idea came through. :0) Brown / Main body = Cow. (How now?) Yellow / Accent pieces = Deer. Holds a phone, keys, cash cards. Made to be held in hand or under arm. Easy access flap. Approximately 8" wide x 4" tall x 1" deep.

Thanks and thanks! And I found it also here named by @Ole South as "... 'Twisted Rope' lacing. Could be a Lazy S stitch or One Thong Stair Stitch... not sure how much different they are or if people just use the names interchangably. Its pretty close to an embroidery Stem Stitch using a single line of holes."

Nice :0)

Hehheh, thanks Ah, but a vintage car is often a passion, and a toy, and a general all-around-fun-thing. Jumpers and trews, not so much (even if people at some levels of affluence will pay more for such things than I paid for my non-vintage vehicle). Your Rally Navigator's Work Board could fit into that first lot, especially if you price and craft them as a luxury item. :0)

Nicely done, bet they're loving it. :0)

Great work!

Nice work! How's your friend liking them now that it's been a while? I was kind of scratching my head over the oval patches on the legs, wondering what function they served, or lacking that what they were supposed to symbolize, until finally zooming in and realizing they were pocket openings. How cool is that? I come from the horse world, even western-style riding, but never wore or was around people with chaps as I never did any work or even rodeo, just pleasure riding and showing far far away from any actual ranch. My loss, certainly! My only close-up experience with chaps comes from the motorcycle world, and I can't think of any I've seen that have pockets. If I ever get in to making chaps (highly doubtful) your work might well inspire me to add pockets. :0)

Interesting look, thanks for sharing! :0)

I'm trying out some lacing. I've the "Lacing & Stitching for Leathercraft" booklet by Tandy, which has 10 different common stitching patterns but this isn't one of them. I know I've seen its name before, but can't recall what it is. If y'all know what it's called and can let me know, that'd be great and save me from having to refer to it as the "that every-other-hole with backtracking stitch pattern". :0) Image shows it on two pieces of scrap with rather haphazard holes. From the back I'm coming up through hole 1 down through 3, up through 2 and down through 4, up through 3 and down through 5, and so on and so forth. It gives a simple "filled" running stitch type pattern on the flipside.

Hi Todd, Rational conversation and discussion is always welcome! My comments on sales tax complexity are a definite complaint, no doubt, and I can see how that would color the reading of the rest of it. My comments on income tax complexity are more expressing a woe, if you will. I do intend to be mobile, so this one will affect me at some point, though in a much less complex way than the sales tax. Also, there is a bill being considered which would greatly reduce the burden on the mobile workforce so there's the potential for relief on that in the next few years. My comments on self-employment tax are not so much a complaint as expressing an "ouch". It's also an element which, in my experience, many writers, artists, crafters, real estate agents, etc. don't remember to weave it into their accounting so I tend to mention it now just by sheer habit. Yes, we do get a deduction related to it when paying income taxes, and yes, in theory we'll get it back someday (on that I'm in the "hopeful but I'll believe it when I see it, they still have 20 more years to fitup" camp), but still, it's a pain point to carve out that extra 7.65% of all revenue and set it aside with the rest of the taxes (fed, reg fica, reg medi, state, and local). Now, if that proposed federal sales tax / no income tax is a flat tax across the board for everybody, every business, and everything -- no loopholes, no exemptions, no deductions -- well, that wraps up the income and sales tax into one nice neat bundle and I'm in, I'll vote for you. :0)

I can see the news headline now: "local saddle maker involved in human-trafficking ring". ~~~~~~~~ Back to the original question from the OP .... I second (third? fourth?) those that suggest experimenting to find what works for you and for your needs. Different products will react with different leathers in (yup, you guessed it) different ways. Even different lots of the same product can behave differently. The joy of small scale, hand-made, eh? Actually, I like it, it makes every product unique. Regardless, experimentation is good so that you can learn what does what, such as the neatsfoot oil darkening the leather as shown in the first two swatches of each row in the image below of some dyeing trials I did. I expected this, though, being a long-time user of neatsfoot. (Please do ignore the horrid cutting and stamping jobs; first time cutting, dull knife, slick surface, never stamped before, all sorts of excuses, learning experience, learning curve, nowhere to go but up, etc., and yes, won't be getting Leather Dye the next time I pick up dye products .. :0))

Late to the tea party, but ... :0) This sales tax debacle in the USA is part of why I've been dragging my feet on creating items for sale. Between my other person and myself, we're capable of creating jewelry, some light metalsmithing, photography, ceramics, and I'm now dipping into leatherwork. All potentially salable things if someone's willing to buy. For anyone to buy it, we have to provide it for sale. In order for us to provide it for sale we have to be willing to track, collect, and remit sales taxes. Every revenuer also has different rules on what $ sales threshold is required for filing, or in others the threshold might be a set number of sales, or in others a combination, or in some few no sales tax is to be collected at all, or in still others one must collect from everyone and remit no matter how small a sale or amount of tax collected. This truly places an undue burden on small businesses. We can't possibly be expected to know every rule for every possible tax jurisdiction and be able to calculate this for our customers and be able to remit sales tax collected on all the varying schedules required. There are sales tax programs out there, e.g. TaxJar and Avalara, etc. that can help in track what's been collected and what's owed to whom. They, of course, come with their own fees. Some sales channels (e.g. Etsy, Amazon) will be the "seller of record" and auto-collect sales taxes for some sales based on some customer locations, and then auto-remit those collected taxes for you to the appropriate revenuer, though for some reason you still have to do the actual filing and say that sales channel x collected and remitted the tax. Yet, even they don't cover every state / county / municipality / etc. / etc. / etc.. so then you're still left trying to figure out where they've collected and where they've paid and what to charge for everyone else and where you owe and how much. It's tempting to just say "sales tax included in price" and then deal with the how much owed to whom later. However, not all sales channels allow for that and just tack on and collect whatever tax they think is needed per their software, so one can't even state that "sales tax included" bit on the product since some customers will still get charged separately (and thus also have paid an increased price, unjustly I think most would say). There's no easy solution here, and it's very daunting, no doubt. What are we doing about it? The masses are bending over and ... or, as the OP says of some, ignoring it completely. Us personally, option #1 and not liking it one bit. Once we have enough sales/mo to justify the monthly fee for Tax Jar or Avalara or the like, we'll be using that. Until then there will be hair pulling, throwing things, probably crying, and paper cuts, and ranting. Oh, and don't get me started on income tax if you're a mobile crafter/seller as I plan to someday be. Ohhh, oooh, ooooh, and that there self-empolyment tax (y'know, that extra FICA and MEDI amount you're supposed to pay on all your earnings that your W2 employer would otherwise pay if you were so employed?). The combination of the three really makes me question this desire to make and sell. But if I don't sell, I can't afford to make. And I wanna make.

Nice!

Beautiful, and the velcro patch attachment is a great bonus feature!

Great work. I love that you both date and number them. :0)

Ah, handy. And nice work, too. :0)

Nice, and your knife holster a thread back, too. :0) Newbie question: what's "HO"? I know it's not Santa Clause's laugh, or a woman of hmmm, skip that, and that it has something to do with the leather, but ....

I've nothing to offer except an observation that using any oil, or conditioner, or any other product that's not designed for use on leather -- please note that I'm picturing you reaching into the kitchen cabinet or shower stall for these sort of things -- might have the tendency to go rancid after a while. I could be totally and completely wrong on both the picture in my head and the possibility of any of it going rancid.

I've no advice on making any, but did out of curiosity look up some. This example looks like a pretty straightforward punch, cut, finish, and seam experience. https://www.ozonebilliards.com/product/leather-web-pool-table-pockets-set-of-6-brown OK, I can't see the seam, even when I zoom over the entire picture they have, but I know it's there, somewhere. :0) That works for tables where you have to go to each pocket after a game to retrieve the balls. I imagine the pockets it gets shorter and with an open area on one side if you're doing this for a table with a ball return system such as mikesc describes.

Here's what I wrote on a blog post recently (and I'm too lazy to retype so copy-n-paste it is), mind you I'm a rank newbie so take it all with a grain of salt. I was talking about dyeing with alcohol-based dyes and how everyone on YouTube vids I've been watching say don't use them and go with oil dyes .... Though I'm still not 100% convinced. Both, per their MSDS sheets, have oleic acid (oil) in the same weight range (5-10%) though certainly their specific % could differ as much as 5%. Leather Dye U.S.M.C Black vs. Pro Dye Black ... the Pro Dye does list more ingredients as solvents. And that's about as far as my chemistry lack-of-knowledge gets me. :0)

"Retread", I like that. :0)

Beautiful! I admit, I'm a Forged in Fire junkie. That's as close as I'm likely to every get to actually forging any weapons myself but it does help me appreciate other's work. Beware, with the craftsmanship evident on the knife, we (that's the "royal we", btw) expect great things from you in your leatherwork as well. Er, but no pressure. :0) Great bracelet too, did you do that as well?