How to Start Leather Crafting

hey everybody so today we're finally gonna do it we're gonna do a little how to get started in leather work video there are a lot of them online but we gonna do a little bit differently so we'll get to this in a minute first sponsored by leave your leather craft as always you can go to their website there are a ton of videos Chuck has done hundreds of videos on anything you could need to know in leather work and they have a bunch of free patterns that we designed so no need to pay for any lessons when you're getting started it's all there for you so first thing we're going to do is just do a tool rundown we're gonna split this into two categories the first category is going to be things that you pretty much have to get at a leather specific place but there's only four things and this is keep in mind this isn't like a you're in leather work already and you want to know what tools to get this is a I want to try the leather work list right because you could try it you could not like like it there's tons of different crafts tons of different hobbies tons of different skills this might not be a frito so a lot of the stuff you can just kind of borrow from neighbors or parents or whatever these are the things that you kind of just you need to get that a lot of people aren't going to have in their junk drawer there or the workshop or shed or whatever so the first thing is a set of sixteen chisels these are used to poke holes in the leather before you stitch these are Weaver stitching chisels they're pretty much the best quality to price ratio that I've ever used in any stitch stitching trizol 's and I've used a lot of stitching chisels in the last 15 years these are a really good bet the next is specific stitching needles for leather these are at John James Tyler needles they're thicker they fit the thread that we're gonna use the third thing wax thread so plenty of places sell wax thread but all leather shops if you're gonna order the rest of the stuff you might as well pick up some mic start while you're there and the last thing of course leather you need leather I recommend when you're just starting and keep in mind this is like a dipping your toes in thing get the cheapest leather in the style that you want to work with so veg tent we work with veg 10 get the cheapest junky estate in that you can find because you want a lot of it that you can mess up if you start out with a really nice leather you're not going to be able to learn you're gonna be too nervous so find like a scrap like a scrap bundle or something for 30 40 bucks get it just get volume you want the weight that's it and we're gonna show you how to practice and how to start later in this video we're just getting the tools out of the way and then the second list is gonna be things that you probably have around the house first thing you need cutting mat preferably self-healing they last a lot longer you cut your leather on this second thing you're gonna need is some sort of mallet now we're gonna use a leather work amount because it's all we have and admittedly this is kind of at the center of the Venn diagram between things you should buy that are leather specific and things that you probably have around the house the biggest thing with the leather working mallet is you want something that has weight to it and you want something that has a hard enough head to work to hit your tools which are made out of metal but the mallet isn't going to get damaged and it's not gonna be hard enough for like a metal hammer to hurt your tools when you see those kits online you see a lot of like very heavy lightweight mallets they're kind of useless if you're gonna have to slam into something four five six times in a row it's not going to teach you anything about leather work it's not going to you should control because a big part of control and leather work is knowing to use the right tools so you want something I think this is like a 16 24 ounce mallet you want something like pound and a half but a hard rubber Durlan whatever that's what you want to start with the next thing rulers metal rulers most importantly cork backed now you want a cork backed ruler because leather is kind of slippery so the way that we're gonna do this is we're gonna put our ruler down and we're gonna use our blade to cut the leather if we're on a metal ruler with no cork you're slipping around tile you get stitches you want a cork back ruler doesn't move at all keeps you nice and safe you still have to be careful when you cut but this is the best way to go for and that also brings us to ablate now you can cut leather thousands of different ways we like a simple exacto blade we use a number two blade on the exacto handle this is a little bit bigger than the standard exacto so it's got a little bit more heft to cut through thicker leather if you're going to do that but it's also flexible enough to do small curbs you can use you know their like I said thousands of different leather specific knives you have scouting knives that people actually cut with you have the like the big traditional leather working knives I like these the best it's like I said personal preference but to get started you can get grab one of these out of the drawer and just give it a go if you get into it and you like it you can go and get a whole collection of knives that'll do specific things for you in the future the last bits and bobs I guess are just like little things that just really help a lot of this is to finish edges and stuff so you need a little bit of water a couple grits of sandpaper we use sort of this is like an 80 or 120 grit this is a 400 grit that's to finish your edges further to finish your edges like I said water a little bit of canvas and beeswax and that's to burnish them and then a lighter this is - once you clip your um which clip your thread in a stitch line you see a little later and that's it that's pretty much everything you need to get started to dip your toe in and decide whether you want to move further ahead in learning the craft so we have the what right what tools do I need now we need the how how do I get started in leather work and I'm gonna take a little bit of a different approach and it might be a little less fun then download a pattern this is how you stitch make something but this is the way that really really helped me get started and it's learning fundamentals and basics so the first thing we're gonna go step by step the first thing you learn to do is to cut leather and this is where the really cheap leather comes in so we're gonna grab a piece of leather we're gonna grab our ruler and this is gonna sound a little silly and seem a little superfluous but hear me out all you're gonna do is cut the leather that's all gonna do put your ruler down keep your fingers away from the edge of the ruler and get a nice sharp blade and just start cutting you don't have to go through in one pass right cut the leather now you know how it feels and then we're just gonna do little tiny slivers maybe an eighth of an inch and you're gonna waste some leather and this I mean I wouldn't call it a waste because you're learning but that's why you want leather no one would really make anything out of because you're not really rate wasting really good material but you're paying for your education this way and material costs and you're just gonna go through and you're just gonna cut the strip slow you're gonna learn what pressure you need you're gonna learn how much effort it takes to cut a straight line you're gonna just do this over and over again until you get the feel of it once you get comfortable with your straight cuts we're gonna go to curves so I just have a little box here pencil and all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna draw little curved lines right I'm gonna take my blade and without a ruler this time I'm gonna cut these curves this is like a 5-ounce veget and i would get something a little thinner you can see I'm kind of pushing hard get something that's maybe a little bit waxy if you have like a bridle that maybe three or four ounces the the wax is gonna help your blade glide through super super easy and you can work your way up right and then once you get comfortable on this then you can do something that's a little more dry like a regular veg to maybe a little bit of a heavier weight and you can learn how to cut like this but if you watch this is gonna go through much easier and you're still learning the basics so once we've got our is cutting down and and we've practiced and we've cut up a whole bunch of leather and people think that we're going crazy what's the next step well now we have the fundamentals that we can cut a nice straight line that means that we can practice making a nice straight stitch line so first we cut our nice piece of leather maybe we just do we're gonna be a little bit crafty so normally in leather work we would use a set of dividers calipers to mark our stitch lines but this video is about an introduction to leather work you're figuring out if this is something you want to invest your time in so if you bought a set of chisels you have a ruler just use your chisel to very lightly just trace a little line on the edge of the leather and that's gonna show us where to stitch so now we're gonna punch holes in our leather and then we can sew now once you get into this you can buy granite blocks and punch pads and stuff but like we've said a bunch of times we're just getting started we're learning or we're trying to figure this out see if we like it so I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my cutting mat I'm gonna protect it with a scrap piece of leather because we are gonna be punching holes through this but as you can see you go through a little tiny bit but you don't really damage you go through cutting that's really quick if you're just punching directly under the leather hose so I'm gonna take my piece of leather and this is we're not making anything all we're doing is practice we've got our straight cut now we're going to punch out some lines and we're gonna take our chisels and we're gonna punch our holes through our leather on our line now if you get a stitching set a chisel set like the Weaver set you're getting four different chisels and four straight lines you really all I need the I think it's six six tooth you want to use the biggest chisel that you can because it's a bunch of holes in a row and it's gonna give you the straightest line you're gonna punch your first line and then instead of going over to your second line you're actually going to overlap two holes or one hole you can do it however you want and that's going to make sure that your spacing is consistent between holes on each punch that you do and I'm just gonna go down and I'm gonna punch all the way down this one alright so you think we're gonna so next we rockin us up next here's we're gonna do you've done this straight line maybe you've done five or six straight lines you've punched you're learning how to get that stitch line to stay exactly where you want it next step we're gonna do a curved line now curved lines are a little bit different so we're gonna just trace out this curve and this could be anything the wider the curve the easier it's gonna be to learn but then you can get into doing really tiny curves like this once you get good right now with a curved line we're not gonna use our giant chisel more than likely if it's a very wide curve we could probably get away with it but we're gonna use either the two the two prong the four prong or maybe where it's so small that we're even using the single prong the two ways that we can do this we can put our first prong in the existing hole and we can punch and that way our spacing is is good and we're punching a single hole if you want to go a little faster but you have to be more careful we put our first prong in the hole existing hole and all we do is mark the second hole so we have our mark then we pick up our chisel we put our first prong on the mark and said our second chisel our second Prohm down ahead of it so that the stitching is still the same distance apart but we're punching two new holes and now it's not twice as fast but you know you save probably 30% of your time so go down the line we've learned how to cut leather we've learned how to punch holes and this all seems pretty meaning but this is the craft you know you have to get really good at very specific things to make very neat tidy projects once you have your holes punched you're gonna learn how to saddle stitch that's a whole video in itself we've actually made that video already so I'm gonna link that in the description so that you can go through once you get to this stage and you can watch that video and now a lot of people stitch with a stitching pony we our video shows you how to stitch without a stitching Pony you're welcome to get one there's no wrong way to do that but if you want to give it a go without investing in a big piece of equipment like that they're not super expensive but they are large give that a go first and you can figure out whether hands to Shin's for you or you want to go machine sewn or if you're even interested in it at all so the last skill we need to learn before we can make a very simple leather working project is finishing your edges now you can do this a bunch of different ways this is a very utilitarian very simple way that we've shown in a bunch of our videos you're gonna take your sandpaper and I have my rougher grit about 120 and my finer grit but at 400 you can use the refere grit if you want if you did really get junky leather and it's it's really fibrous you can sand it down with the 121st this is still pretty tight grain so I'm just gonna use the 400 hit it with a little 400 and we're almost gonna start polishing it with this because the sandpaper it's so fine now once we have that done all we're gonna do is take a little bit of water wet our edged a little bit you don't want to soak it we're just dampening it slightly we take our canvas this is any canvas fabric would tool handles work well you can use antler and we're just gonna rub back and forth and you'll feel it grip but as you keep going the heat and the from the burnishing and the actual burnishing itself they're gonna draw the oils out from the inside of the hide and our edge is going to start to get shiny and it's gonna those fibers are gonna be sealed you can see there it gets a little slick it gets a little squeaky and that's all it takes so then we can hit it with some beeswax and so once you have these few skills you've learned how to cut you know how that feels you've learned how to punch fairly straight you've learned how to saddle stitch and you have a little burnishing then you get into making some small stuff right and I'm being I'm being a stickler here for technique because the better your technique the more fun you're gonna have when you start making stuff it's it's never feels good to hop into making a project and mess it up and and you feel horrible about it it's you're not motivated to restart if you practice this way and then you jump into making small projects you have a higher chance of success and if you're successful at your first project you're gonna want to do your second project if you're successful your second project you know it keeps going and all of a sudden 13 years later you're making youtube videos about leather work and and so once you have all of these things maybe take a few days maybe take a week after work spend an hour just cutting leather spend an hour just punching holes put on a movie and learn how to saddle stitch you know once you have those basics down we're gonna get into a small project and I'm going to show you how we put everything together to make a very simple card holder and so once you've got all those skills under your belt we can move to something like this this is just gonna be a simple card holder the first thing I want to point out is that I'm using sort of the edge of a hide right there's a lot of really good usable material here but it's it's got some marks and stuff it's it's not a perfect pristine piece of leather I personally think that's very important because you're not going to be afraid to mess up on this you're new to this you're probably gonna you know I still mess up everyone messes up and you don't want the pressure of thinking you're gonna ruin a good piece of leather so if you start off with leather that isn't super great it's it's gonna be you know you can't use it for finish really for finished projects anyway it's gonna be less pressure on you and you're gonna be able to learn a lot more freely that way and so we're just gonna use all the skills we went over to make a simple card holder the first step straight cut the next step the curve cut and the next step we didn't practice but it's just applying glue so you this is contact cement you can use whatever sort of glue you like but we're gonna apply some glue and this is a little folded design so we're gonna glue here here here in here we're gonna get this glued up before we punch we're just gonna stick this glue down and you can see here I got a little bit of glue on the back of this totally inadvertently but this is a good illustration of why you want to just kind of work with leather scraps for your first few projects you're just trying to learn the basics get used to putting things together the more you do this the more comfortable you're going to be when it comes time to make things out of full quality leather and so now we need to punch holes in this to get stitching so you get to this stage your glue in a couple pieces together the wing dividers do make a big difference in just marking your stitch line it's just super easy so you adjust your wing dividers to say let's say a little less than an eighth of an inch from your edge and that gives your stitch line but it's not impossible to do the ruler if you don't want to invest in wing dividers yet so we're just gonna do the same thing we did when we were learning we're gonna get our ruler where we want it and we're just gonna use the tip of our single hole punch you can also use like a nail or a scratch awl or something and there's really not much difference between the two and now as we practice before we're just going to punch our holes in themself our last step a little sandpaper a little burnishing we're good to go and here we go this is our finished simple product so we've learned how to cut we've learned how to punch and how to sew and we learn how to finish edges really really simple to just practice one step at a time and not put the stress of a finished piece as your first thing on you and then when you get to making something you're more calm you know that you can do all of the steps you just haven't put them together yet and when you do you had a nice simple functional piece and so that's gonna be it this is our sort of intro to leather work if you've never done anything before we're using a couple simple specific leather tools and then we're using things we have around the house to just dip our toes in and see if it's something we want to get into further there's gonna be links in the description for all the tools that we used in materials and there's going to be some more advanced stuff too if you're if you want to get into things like skiving edges and you want to get a nice mallet all of those things are going to be available below we are sponsored by weaver but we've used weaver materials for 10 years plus and all of the things that they make offer a great quality to price ratio and you can use them professionally and so thank you guys for watching so much and we'll see you next time

Channel: Corter Leather

Views: 941,466

Keywords: How to Start Leather Crafting, beginning leather craft, corter, corter leather, leather crafting lessons, leather lessons, how to start leatherwork, leather work, leather craft, leathercraft, leather tools, leather types, leather tutorial, start leather, make a leather wallet, how to make things out of leather, leather DIY

Id: CLPkVvI9yFg

Length: 21min 39sec (1299 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020