How To Wet Mold Leather

hey everybody today we're gonna do a little wet molding tutorial web molding leather is when you wet leather and mold it pretty self-explanatory and you wet mold leather to put shapes into leather that you would otherwise have to build structurally so this is a little card holder and it holds twenty or thirty cards but because we wet molded it we only had to do one little seam and so we'll show you how to do that in this video so we have a chunk of leather here you want to use veg to you can usually get away with wet molding died hides and stuff but if it has a lot of oil it's gonna be kind of difficult because the water won't penetrate through the hide we're using just totally natural vegetable tanned leather is from Herman oak Weaver carries it and this is just a little bit of water some people the temperature of the water I know if you boil leather that's how they use to make with their armor this is just room-temperature water and all we're gonna do is we're gonna put the leather into the water and if you listen you'll hear the air escaping the leather and that's good that means waters replacing the air in the fibrous layer of the leather and that's what we want and so we're just gonna leave that in there I just leave it in until the bubbles stop some people leave it in for a half-hour I've never really found the need to do that as long as it stops making noise that usually tells me and bubbles are gone that usually tells me that water has replaced air in the hole all of the hide so we'll leave that for maybe a couple minutes so well soaking a little bit you need something to mold your leather - you can make molds out of custom pieces of wood or you can use whatever you're molding you can wrap it in plastic wrap I just have this old tin here and I put some double stick tape on the back I'm just gonna stick that to a little old piece of wood here and that's gonna be our mold this is the same thing that I use for this and cards fit in here nicely so when that leather is ready we're gonna take it out and we're gonna mold it to this piece or a did use some thumbtacks super super simple and we'll get this all set up and molded and then we'll let it dry so we don't have any more bubbles coming out there's no noise so I'm gonna pull the leather cuz that's about as wet as it's gonna get and we'll let it drip down and then what I like to do is I give it a minute it's not gonna dry out in a minute but I just give a minute so we don't have any more standing water on the leather before I start molding so from molding you're gonna use your hands mostly but then we're gonna bring in a couple other tools and you can use whatever you want I like to use for little curves like this I like to use a sharpie this rounded edge of a Sharpie works nice for if you're doing a holster or something like that you can use bone folders that'll get more into intricate little shapes and nooks and crannies that you need to mold into for this Sharpie is pretty much all you need so we're gonna start our leather has dried off a little bit and we're gonna start by simply putting our leather just right on to the top of our little mold here now what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna gently and this is about a four or five ounce lie there I'm just gonna gently start working the lather down with my hands and you're kind of stretching the leather here the water makes it a little more stretchy but you're really you are molding it you're not you don't want to be gentle with this you're not gonna rip anything you just want to sort of gently start working this shape in with your hands so once we've gotten to the stage where a little bit of our pattern of our mold is starting to kind of connect you can see it's we have our leather is touching and then it comes up and over and down and that's about what we need it to do we're gonna start securing a couple little spots here so that we can move on and work on the more difficult parts or curves and in the rest of it so I'm just using thumbtacks you can use nails you can use whatever you want some people make full molds but for little pieces like this you're doing everything by hand thumbtacks usually work so I'm just gonna start by putting a couple thumbtacks in the top here and what's that what that's gonna do is when I start to mold this it's gonna prevent me from just pulling this whole piece down now you can see I've put my thumbtack about half to an inch away from this edge you don't want to put the thumbtack right up here against the edge of this the seam that you're molding because we're gonna be keeping this so we're gonna end up cutting probably about right here and our stitch line is gonna go in here so if I'm poking holes in this area it's gonna show up in our final piece the other reason is when we start using our molding tools like the sharpie we need room to go through here like this so if I were to put this thumbtack closer I couldn't fit my molding tools in so I've pretty much gotten as far as I can get with my fingers I'm gonna start using my little tools here to mold and I looking at it I think what I'm gonna need to do is and then he probably use my bone folder to get this flat face and then I'm probably going to use the curve of my sharpie here to get the transition to where it'll meet up and where we're gonna stitch on the bottom the first I'm actually gonna do is use my my sharpie and I'm gonna kind of just go around and this is this takes a while you gotta kind of go at it for a while because this leather is going to continue to mold and stretch into the shape that you want and so what I'm doing here is I'm actually I'm pushing pretty firmly with my sharpie because my fingers a lot bigger than this and so I can't get this crease with my finger so with the sharpie I can push and it'll continue to stretch out this leather and really get that this curve nice here and I think I'm good to go you know 10-15 minutes a messing with it making sure all of our curves are nice I think we've got the shape that we need everything is molded nicely there's no wrinkles and so once you get to this point we're just gonna let it dry we'll probably be overnight but we're gonna let this to dry and just leave it and when we come back we'll cut it out and we'll assemble everything after drying overnight this is what we have so what we're gonna do is we're gonna pull out all of these tacks and when we remove this you see it's kept its shape completely and so once you have your wet molded piece you would trim it up and just assemble your wallet we're not gonna do that in this video we have a couple other videos in our channel where we make full pieces like this with the wet molded home construction so I hope this this was helpful and we'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: Corter Leather

Views: 129,872

Keywords: How To Wet Mold Leather, leather craft, corter leather, corter, leathercraft, wet mold leather, molding leather, leather tutorial, Corter leather and cloth, leather pouch, leatherwork, wet molding, making leather pouch

Id: u1Udxgq-nvU

Length: 7min 56sec (476 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020