Mystery Braid Bracelets!

[J W Craftsman]

Are you dying and putting finish on prior to cutting your slits? What is the optimal weight leather, I used 2oz but it seemed too "floppy" like it didn't want to hold the braid.

[J W Craftsman]

Are you dying and putting finish on prior to cutting your slits? What is the optimal weight leather, I used 2oz but it seemed too "floppy" like it didn't want to hold the braid.

[Grey Drakkon]

Are you dying and putting finish on prior to cutting your slits? What is the optimal weight leather, I used 2oz but it seemed too "floppy" like it didn't want to hold the braid.

How I'm doing these is:

1.Tape the back of the leather, which is somewhere around 3 oz for the most part. The "floppy" bit of it has more to do with the consistency of the leather rather than the thickness of it in this case, because some of my 2oz stuff is fairly stiff while some of the thicker is from the belly and softer.

2.Cut the straps and slots with a blade/rotary cutter. Like NstarLeather says though, it's time consuming and leaves a lot of room for screwups.

3. Airbrush the dye onto the leather, then hand paint acrylic heat setting paint onto the edges (I'm using Lumiere Acrylics). This leather is so thin it would be more aggravating than anything to try and burnish it, but I don't like frizzy edges so using a super sharp blade combined with the paint cleans them up pretty well, plus I can use any color that I want. In theory you should be able to keep the tape on the back, but I end up making a huge mess every time I do that so it's around this point I pull the tape off.

4. Hit it up with the hairdryer to "set" the acrylic, then spray a coat of diluted resolene on it.

5. Add snaps.

For the brown Horween, skip steps 3 and 4.