Stars And Stripes Printed Seat Leather

[troy]

My wife would like her old style bandit 600 seat done in the style of the stars and stripes - I'm wondering if their is possibly some suitable leather out their that has it printed on already, if not, which I suspect is the case, whats the best type of leather to use and which I can get in red, white and blue?

construction wise (sorry have only used veg tan prodominetly) I was thinking the leather would be thin, so was thinking of sewing each flag element onto another base thin piece underneath. Does that sound OK.

Cheers for any help.

Paul

[troy]

finished the seat. I used nappa clothing leather in the end as it was the only type which offfered the colours I needed. Backed the pieces I was using with muslin to avoid over stretch, cut to pattern and sewn together.

Went with one star as 1, is was easier and looked alot cleaner then applying loads of little one's, plus 2, she grew up in texas, so fitted in with her idea's.

[TXAG]

Looks like this...neat...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Liberia

[troy]

I was going by the one shown on this page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Texas - but cheers..

[electrathon]

looks cool

[TXAG]

I was going by the one shown on this page - http://en.wikipedia....i/Flag_of_Texas - but cheers..

Right. Except I was also born in Texas and lived here all my life. Yours looks like the Liberian flag.

...not that there's anything wrong with that. Just looks closer to the liberian flag than Texas'.

But like I said...it's neat. I'm certain she'll love it.

Edited December 29, 2013 by TXAG

[troy]

It was the old texas naval flag that attracted the wife, but ye she loves it either way - as for construction I thought alittle more detail might help those who are thinking of doing something similar.

As stated I used nappa which is quite thin and does stretch, so the muslin really helped prevent that and also make the sewing easier, as I did use the normal two legged foot. Each stripe is 2 inches wide plus 1 inch overlaps either side to help create a smooth surface to sit on, rather then ridges. Each overlap was glued together using white pva glue (which alloud some movement to match the two opposing sides up before sewing and was easy to part onced sewn and then ironed). I used a number 14 leather needle with stitch width of 3.5mm, tension I'm told was automatic on the machine I used.

Before starting this project, I made a template of the seat from a spare piece of leather, transfered these measurements to illustrator and drew in the flag. These measurements were then used to cut out each stripe etc - for the star I just cut the shape out of the blue, placed the white piece underneath and hand sewn it on. I hand sewn this part because the muslin with the stripes helped prevent any drag, but without it, the machine did'nt seem to like it.

thats about it I think, but please ask if theirs anything else...

Paul

[GrampaJoel]

Nice straight sewing job you did on the stripes!

Joel