New to leather work, my first practice piece :)

[edwardmorris]

So I managed to get the beaders exchanged for the next size up and also purchased Barry King 30 and 40 degree bevelers. These are certainly top notch. I've been practicing cutting as well and starting to get the hang of it. I'm getting pretty comfortable making long straight cuts using a ruler but still need a ton of practice for free hand stuff like curves. Same for the beaders. Couple lessons learned when making this belt hanger from a pretty good piece I salvaged from more scraps.

1. Simply cutting with the swivel knife isn't enough to get a nice deep bead and actually have the leather round on top.
2. Cutting deep with the swivel knife makes the bead come out good but the cut looks hideous.
3. Cutting with swivel knife first, beading to establish a groove, then cutting deeper with a box cutter knife works much better as it allows the beader to go deep without making the cut look bad.
4. There must be something I'm missing when pressing on the snaps with my goldstar press, or I punched out the holes off center as they seem to be ever so slightly off (may 1/32 to 1/16).

Made several other mistakes as I kept working away at this piece, and am happy to have those out of my system. I will be trying a modest *real* small project next where I'll do my best to avoid mistakes and keep getting better.

[PastorBob]

practice, practice, practice.  Even after a few years, i am still making rookie mistakes.  I would rather try and learn from it, then not try at all.  Keep up the work, you WILL continue to get better.  Thanks for sharing your progress.

[edwardmorris]

On 6/29/2021 at 6:01 AM, PastorBob said:

practice, practice, practice.  Even after a few years, i am still making rookie mistakes.  I would rather try and learn from it, then not try at all.  Keep up the work, you WILL continue to get better.  Thanks for sharing your progress.

Thank you Pastor, for the encouragement :) For my day job I feel the same way, years of experience and I still make the silliest of mistakes.

I have been making time to get more practice in and I'm starting to get comfortable with BK bevelers and beaders. Someone on my other thread had suggested using tape on the back to prevent stretching, and that helped quite a bit especially with the edge beading! I still need more practice with the backgrounders, even with the tape (shelf paper to be exact) on the back, towards the end the leather did stretch and warp a little. I am also getting much better with casing for the leather I'm working with. I believe I need to practice backgrounding some more with the leather less wet to prevent the stretch. I also rigged up a makeshift press using a toggle clamp I had (not my original idea, pretty sure I saw someone else do it a while ago). This is working out great for logo stamps, as well as cutting out holes for snaps. Another lesson learnt was that eventhough I didn't cut the holes until after the backgrounding, they still don't line up even after correcting the original plan lines. Next piece I shall experiment using a template that I can use the cut the holes once all the tooling is finished and the leather has had time to warp (I know 0 warp is unlikely) and settle. I also took a stab at using the double beveler from Tandy for another part of the project. The tool has too sharp an edge at the rear and as hard as I tried I couldn't avoid it leaving teeth marks. I need to check with BK if they make a steep version of it, knowing their quality the end result will likely be better than this. I have more  pictures but restricted on how many I can share at a time, so I will add some more later.

As always, feedback is much appreciated.

[edwardmorris]

Goal with learning how to use the double beveler is to eventually be able to do this

 

Couple more pix

Edited July 10, 2021 by edwardmorris
last pic

[edwardmorris]

I've been away for a while but I've been busy practicing :). I have a bunch of pix to share but the camera on the new phone takes images in large size, how do I post pix that are more than 1.46M?

[johnnydb]

28 minutes ago, edwardmorris said:

I've been away for a while but I've been busy practicing :). I have a bunch of pix to share but the camera on the new phone takes images in large size, how do I post pix that are more than 1.46M?

http://www.shrinkpictures.com/resize.php

[Klara]

Does your phone not allow to resize pictures? Even my entry-level Samsung tablet has the function. 

[Northmount]

13 hours ago, edwardmorris said:

I've been away for a while but I've been busy practicing :). I have a bunch of pix to share but the camera on the new phone takes images in large size, how do I post pix that are more than 1.46M?

Take a look at some helps and options in this thread.  https://leatherworker.net/forum/topic/15122-how-to-post-pictures-on-lw/?do=findComment&comment=551171

 

[edwardmorris]

Thanks! Trying with resized pix. Made some coasters/place mats to get some practice with beading and basic tooling (backgrounding is terrible but not needed for the title belts ;)).

Have to do these one at a time

[edwardmorris]

Above two are gaming, next two are wrestling

Not very good at detail painting, most certainly need a LOT of work with the swivel knife on circles/tight curves