Buckskin Shirt made from Deer tan Cowhide

hi everybody i'm richard from small caliber arms review we're going to do another leather project today this one is going to be an early frontiersman shirt pattern it's from eagle view patterns and we're going to go ahead and take some of this i've got some deer tan cowhide now it's not dear skin but it's a lot bigger than deerskin and i don't have to piece as many pieces together and i don't have to buy as many hides dear tanned deerskins are pretty expensive and deer tanning is a type of tanning that makes the leather nice and soft and everything and it's it's pretty resilient material i guess it's what the frontiers would have worn of course the material was plentiful back then they could go hunt a deer and you know tan to hide themselves and put it all together we're going to use some of this artificial sinew to sew it up we're going to use a whip stitch on every seam all by hand i may pre-punch the holes though just so i can get the spacing looking nice and even and we're going to get this pattern out of the pack now it's about five sheets in here and you have to because of the size of the paper they actually print different parts on different sheets and you have to cut pieces out and put them together we're going to transfer the pattern onto some it's painters masking paper it's kind of a heavy paper not as heavy as what i use in some of the patterns but it's still heavier than the newsprint type paper that they've got in these pattern packs and it just makes it easier to trace the image onto the leather when i've got a stiffer paper to work with plus the pattern for the front and the back is actually in two pieces so you either fold the material in half and you cut through there you know and then open it up or you can take the pattern and transfer it from one side to the other and trace around it we're going to put it on one big piece of paper use it as one solid piece that way i can position it on the material and properly get it marked out cut out and sewn together anyways let's get this pattern opened up i'm going to do that off camera get it all put together and everything put my paper patterns together and then we'll go from there [Applause] [Music] all right i've got some scrap pieces here i'm going to cut my shoulder cap fringe out of and i've already trimmed up a couple edges on it i put a brand new sharp blade in there because this stuff i want to bunch up on you a little bit if you don't have a good sharp blade so i'll line that up on the edge hold this down pretty tight so it doesn't move and then give it a good slice and there we go now i've got two of these cut out and i got some more to trim up i already cut all my bigger pieces out the uh the front the back and the um let's see what else that i cut the collar and the two sleeves are all cut out now i'm just trying to make use of as much of the scraps as i can and you can see here this was where the back the neckline for the back cut out of that piece and i kind of laid it out so i could figure out what i needed and my longest fringe piece is going to be actually the front fringe and it will fit in here i'll try to maximize as much of this as i can all these little pieces like this you can actually use these to make different things you could make key chains out of it if you wanted to or different strap pieces or something there's a lot of stuff you can do with all these little scraps take it as far that way as i can into there and i do not need it on there so it's just a guide and if it's not the fringe part does not need to be perfect the other pieces the front the back the sleeves you want to make those as close to perfect as you can because that will affect your pattern miss just a little bit right there all right i'll cut my front fringe out of that piece my back fringe is my next longest piece i only need one of those let me see here two sleeve fringes i've got the front fringe i've got the back fringe i got the shoulder cap fringe i have got uh the collar i'm gonna put a nice little collar on there i hope it comes out nice anyways i've got the two sleeves cut out this actually takes up quite a bit of leather for these sleeves they're pretty big uh and i got the fronts and the backs cut out so i'm gonna get sewn these together starting at the shoulder seam right up here and i did a little test piece because i have not done a whole lot of whip stitch on i haven't done any whip stitching on leather other than this little test piece i just did i did sew a skin on a kayak one time it was a polyester fabric and i used dental floss and did a whip stitch on it but it turned out pretty good i think and it's a good strong seam that's for sure probably not as strong as a saddle stitch but this really does well and i'm going to go ahead and pre-punch the holes in it just because i want the stitches to be as uniform as possible i know it's not a finely tailored garment but i want it to look the best i can anyways and i want to keep my stitches even so i've got this little three millimeter set of punches here and i'm going to use my stitch groover now it does not leave a groove in the leather like it does when you're using veg tan like when i'm doing the holsters and stuff but i've got it set up at an eighth of an inch and that's what they allow for a seam allowance on this pattern is eighth inch it will leave enough of a line on there for me to see it barely but i can see it so i'm going to go ahead and start with the shoulder seams and put my little groove on there get my holes punched in it and get to stitching it up [Music] i've got the shoulder seams done i've got the neck split open there i think the next step is to sew the collar on there so i'll get that on and move on from there okay i've got the shoulder seams done and i've got the collar on there i got a little bit of mismatch right here not a big deal i didn't quite get it centered up like it should have been i guess but the shoulder seams and the collar are on there and that's quite a task to sew that thing on there with all them curved surfaces now the next thing i got to do is put the sleeves on here so to put the sleeves on you've got to line up multiple notches in this opening on here i got them lined up the seam and the double notches in the back and the single notches in the front so i need to make sure i've got everything lined up the way it's supposed to be there's my double notch there that's going to get lined up there my shoulder seam is right there and my single notch is right there so i'm going to pre-punch all my holes all the way around there just like i did with the uh the shoulder seams and the collar they're difficult to see from this wrong side and you sew the wrong sides with the wrong sides out there and then whip stitch it all the way around you can actually feel the needle go through there a little bit better than you can see it anyways but i'm gonna get these holes punched in this thing and then get it put together all right this is one of the toughest things to try to show is the sewing of it so i've got three layers here i've got my sleeve i've got my sleeve cap fringe and then i've got the actual body this is the back part of it with the double notches on there i've already pre-punched all my holes and like i said i'm sewing through the back side so you can't even see the holes here you kind of have to feel for them so what i've done is i started with my first stitch there at the center seam that way i don't push it off one way or the other i've got less of a chance of coming out wrong if i go from the middle outward and i've taken my thread pulled it all the way through the first hole did a couple half hitches on the the knot there and then i've taken the tail of that and i've laid it over here so that when i'm doing these stitches on here the whip stitch actually just makes a whole series of circles all the way around the seam i've actually taken that tail and laid it over there and then i pull my thread through and tie that tail down now this is a waxed artificial sinew and it's it's really strong stuff you can see the tail right there i'm pulling that over and tying it kind of into the the seam itself so hopefully it won't pull out and then again they've got to find those holes and it's almost a little easier to feel the hole because they're sure enough hard to see and i've done about four times the length of thread that i need to do my seam or at least the four times the length of the seam hopefully it's enough to do the seam and then just keep on going keep whipping that thing around there and once you get into a groove and you keep everything lined up it's actually pretty easy pretty quick i'm doing a little short pulls here because the camera's kind of in the way but just keep on going until you get it all the way around there uh every now and then you get into a groove and everything goes just right okay there is half of the shoulder seam i had to sew through three layers to a point and then two layers when i got the two layer part it really got quick i'm going to trim off those little tabs right there too because that'll just create a bump in the i just trimmed a little bit that's where the lining alignment tabs were so now i'm going to start this seam and go this way with it now okay there it is one sleeve well at least part of one sleeve i still got to sew the opening there to close it up but i've got the uh the shoulder fringe piece on there i've got it all stitched on there and it actually come out pretty good i think it did anyways just kind of pull that seam apart a little bit to kind of flatten it out some but it's getting there still a lot more sewing to do it takes a while to go around there so i'm going to put the other sleeve on next and then i'll work on closing the seam up at the bottom of the sleeve there and putting that fringe piece in there too that's still three layers but that's the whole length of it there at least on this piece i only had to do three layers for a little part of it and then two layers for the rest the two layer part goes a lot quicker sleeve number two glad i don't have three arms there's a lot of stitching that goes into one of these things and a whole lot of fringe to cut i'm cutting them about oh i'd say about a quarter inch wide maybe 3 16 somewhere around there and some of it you can cut with a straight edge and a razor but even that gets tough especially like on the front fringe where there's a curve to it and everything it's hard to get it lay flat and do your cuts nice and even so i'm going to finish this up with scissors and it tends to cramp up the hands a little bit so if you're going to make one of these don't expect to make it in just a couple hours it's going to take some time there's a lot of work that goes into one of these and if you're going to buy one from somebody that hand makes them and they ask what you think is a crazy high price try making one yourself because it's a job okay there it is that is my buckskin shirt now it's not not actually made out of deer skin this is deer tan cowhide and the whole reason i did that is if you've ever priced deerskins they are extremely expensive probably about 90 bucks a piece if you buy them you know from weaver or tandy or someplace like that so they're going to be pretty expensive and deer tan deerskins are pretty small too so it would have taken me probably six of those to make one of these shirts so at about five to six hundred dollars for one i can't do that now the deer tan cowhide is not all that cheap either these were about 90 bucks a piece and it took me two of them to do this so like i said when somebody says they hand make these things and they want you know three four five hundred dollars for one go ahead and pay it because it's a lot of work now i could have saved myself a lot of time by using my sewing machine but i wanted to keep it as traditional as possible without going too crazy i could have used real deerskins and i could have hand sawn the whole thing with actual sinew i used artificial sinew you can get a whole spool of it like this i don't know how many yards are on there but there's a bunch it's a waxed sinew and it's good strong thread to hold this thing together and really it's it's a fun project but it takes patience a lot of patients probably more patients than skill although skill is needed too anyways i'm going to get this thing try it on and see if it fits right all right there it is all the fringe is on it's all hand stitched with artificial sinew all the fringe on the back fringe on the shoulder pieces there that's it's a lot of work to cut one of these things out but really it's it's a pretty fun project and not that difficult to do really time consuming but if you want to try one of these out uh you can pick up on these patterns this is the early frontiersman shirt pattern from eagle view patterns is the one i used and i got two of them this one is from missouri river patterns it is the trapper's fringed buckskin shirt this one has a little more uh it's got longer fringe on it it just depends on which one you want to do there's a few other patterns out there both of these companies produce patterns for a bunch of different pioneer type clothing and stuff and i think it's pretty cool i like it and i don't know that i would ever do another one maybe i might get ambitious and do the pants to go with it too and maybe a skin cap or something but it'd be pretty fun anyways thanks for taking a look at making the buckskin shirt and if you could check out some of my other videos up here and hit this button right here to subscribe if you haven't already thanks for watching

Channel: Small Caliber Arms Review

Views: 1,349

Rating: 4.9540229 out of 5

Keywords: S.C.A.R., Small Caliber Arms Review, Buckskin Shirt, Frontier shirt, making a deertan shirt, deertan cowhide, indian shirt, leather project, fringe shirt, mountain man shirt, leather shirt

Id: YB1bCtyovk8

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 18 2021