Leather Tooling w/ Jim Linnell Pt. I.

[Music] [Music] [Music] hey guys [Laughter] you got it liz is not with us today so i'm the hey guys guy the hey guys guy the hey guys guy who who'd you bring along with you well he brought me i believe yeah okay this is the world famous gentleman famous man we're all proud to have him here oh yeah we've been having a good time already this week i think we've got four videos down already four yeah yeah we did two on monday two yesterday we're going to give you a break today you're just gonna have to do a live video so that's all right yeah we recorded the other ones unless you were on twitch you gotta you got a glimpse into a few other lives but we were talking when we were talking maybe monday what we were gonna do for this live and i was like you know there's been a few questions every now and then about about feathers and you're like well i've done a feather or two i'm like well let's see what you can do then yeah benefit there too here we are we're gonna be doing some of that so why don't you i guess denny introduce your introduced you yeah i'm jim so that's about it it's kind of like a like uh alcoholics and ominous anonymous you know i'm uh i'm jim and i have a problem yes and i've had that problem for let's see this year makes 55 years since i first got a beginner set of tools so it's been um it hasn't been painful though it's actually what i love to do i retired um five years ago so i can do what i love to do you were you retired from tandy i work i put almost 40 years within with them so i was able to make a a living doing what i love to do and you know i in fact one of the reasons i do a lot of teaching today is because you know i was the face of tandy out at all these leather shows and such like that and it wasn't uncommon to have somebody come up and say man you got the best job in the world i mean you get to travel all over the place you get to do leather work and you make a living at it and you know they were right i did have the best job in the world i love getting up and going to work every day and and i i uh now that i'm retired you know i i kind of feel obligated to uh to pass on what i know i mean i am the guy that got to do what i love to do and there's so many people that get up and uh yeah i got to work right you know i never had that and but you know now if i were to just like turn into a hermit or something like that and take all of this knowledge and experience that i have in the world of leather working and just kind of hide in my shop i think the world would be able to say shame on you jim linnell shame on you you got to do what everybody else dreams of doing every other weather worker would love to be able to do what you did and you're not going to pass that on yeah shame on you anyway well now you get to show everything so now i get to share all you guys have to do is tune in yeah that's all right so anyway yes we talked about yeah can we do feathers and yes i i can do feathers in fact there's a lot of feathers that are done out there and a lot of those folks that are teaching people how to do feathers probably learned how to do it for me so i'll show you how i do them and you all are welcome to do them that way or not and there's there's several ways you can do it i've got a piece of leather work here where i've got uh a uh a feather that's just carved on there and the edges are lifted up and i'll show you how that's done that's that's pretty easy but yeah you know i do these three dimensional ones in fact i've been practicing here just a little bit this morning and uh here's uh here's what we're gonna make i'm gonna show you how to do this a true live three-dimensional feather like this i've got a question what do you do with feather like that well let's see if you could put a bread on the back of it i guess that would make a heck of a hair bread if you you know they don't all have to be this size either i i've taken some i wish i'd have brought some might you can take and shrink this down about like that and get some earring finding to make some of the coolest stinking earrings you ever saw um and they're really popular i um tell you a story about that and in fact i'm going to make one of those so while i'm doing that i'm going to work while while we talk um i was up i i had a chance to uh teach some classes up in anchorage alaska and uh i was uh with the 4-h up there and of course i had a table with all my samples out there but there's a limit of what you can carry in your luggage going to alaska so um so i took some of these earrings with me up there and they again they're i mean a little scrap of leather like this i could get a pair of earrings out of that you know so there's like nothing in them uh but you paint them but they look really cool and i i had these laying out on the table on some other things and um and i had this lady come up she said oh my god those are awesome how much are they and i said well they're not for sale i'm just here showing you what what you can make with leather and and uh she said and she was just insistent and you're making a scene almost out of it and some other ladies showed up there as well and um so they uh she said well if you did if you were gonna sell those how much would they go for and i said i don't know you know what 25 bucks or something like that they're not that much and she grabbed i had like four prayers she grabbed them all like that she said i'll take them and and i thought i was going to have a fight right there because these other gals that were there she can't do that you know so they they anyway so i told him i said all right i said i'll let you i'll let you buy them but you're going to have to wait till the show's over because that's my samples but they they are that appealing and they are that cool so and what i'm going to show here is basically how that's done and again i'm going to make this one large enough so you can see it but um so a feather pattern i i didn't have bring a tracing pattern but there's not much to it they're pretty simple to just sketch on here um they uh need to have a little bit of a bow to them and you can see that it's what white leather are you using there this here is it's about two ounce maybe uh it's pretty lightweight which is perfect for this because we want to deceive people into thinking that it's it really is a real a real feather right so we want it to look really thin in fact i'm going to skive it down some from here so starting out you can see my pattern hopefully that shows up on the camera whatever you're looking at there uh i just sketched a rough outline and you can see how rough that is but uh i'm gonna use that as a guide then to get it cut in here so we gotta have a quill running up the middle of it right so gotta have your swivel knife all tuned up so you can make it go where you want it to go and then we're just gonna cut the outline of it here now i know that sample i showed you had the edges all kind of twisted up and stuff like that but that's not how i start out with it i start out with it just getting that general shape on the leather everybody has to reserve judgment correct i was telling folks in one of those videos i did earlier that i get to do a lot of judging i i get to do the like with the leather debut and all that up in sheridan so yeah i i'm the most judgmental person there is not really i um we all start at the same place you know i started out with six basic stamping tools they were what came in a beginner's kit i was age 11 when i got those and uh you know that's all i had and it's that's really i found out that in a swivel knife that's really all you need too i did a lot of leather work with that for many years before i ever was able to afford to buy more stuff and it uh that that it still is all you really got to have um so anyway let me get back to what i'm doing here i'll tell you all the stories about me you want well you you pulled out a tool and i knew the question was going to come what is this not that one not that one the old faithful oh this one yeah okay yeah i was calling this old faithful in the in the videos because well this is the one that uh and i don't know if you've panned all this stuff that's laying out here but all this leather work that's out here that i've done anyway was all done with this swivel knife um big stuff small stuff floral stuff figure carving embossing all of it is done with this one here i don't have a different swivel knife for every kind of work that i do i use this one for everything which is um one of the things i sometimes judge people on who they i i've had people actually blame their knife before as to why they can't do it and you know what that ain't going to work with me even if you drop it it's not the knife's fault you can't right jim you have a ceramic blade this one here you drop it you got a problem but you know what uh it isn't the the knife i mean i've got another one here that's just plain old metal uh blade in it and and it would do all of the same stuff you know what what i can do with that swivel knife what what a swivel knife will do has a lot more to do with the hand that's running it than it does with the knife sure um you ought to see some of the the swivel knives that some of these old saddle makers used to use holy smokes they were crude they were nowhere near as fancy or as pretty as what we use today but you know what the work they did was outstanding and uh but yeah mine that i use it old faithful here's a quarter inch wide straight blade it's a ceramic blade but there again there's nothing magical about ceramic ceramic is uh actually more fragile you got to be careful if you did drop it on the marble it's it's pretty well done um but it it's one i've had for a long time and what i like about it is the thickness of it it's a thicker blade than what most blades are today like a thick blade oh absolutely absolutely because um uh how fine a cut i make has more to do with the pressure i put on the blade than it does how thick the blade is there's a lot of people think to do this really fine stuff something really intricate like that that oh i got to have a really tiny intricate blade to be able to do that that's hogwash you got to learn how to use what you got and that they they really doesn't matter about the knife it matters about how much you've practiced with it more than anything else how familiar you get yourself with it absolutely absolutely so anyway i'm going back to this i gotta i'm gonna bevel the the uh the quill that runs up the middle of this feather and i'm gonna use uh i got a pair of bevelers here in fact mine are old enough they don't even have numbers on them but if you were to go out there shopping for these there's a they have diagonal lines on them they're a b202l and a b202r and they they have guiding lines and what they do is they start to give me the the texture coming off of this quill that i want to have so you know when i bevel this equipment in in the world of the sheridan style carving they have something called the leaf liner and it works kind of like this except i can't run those for spit they don't walk for me i have to make one impression and then move it but this here i can use like a regular beveler and and it and it works pretty good so and you'll notice i snuck a piece of cardboard underneath that why do you do that why did i do that i knew that question is coming i do that because this this cardboard it isn't just cardboard it's uh actually somebody ripped it off the back of their tablet for me um and uh the reason for that is this uh cardboard underneath there uh will absorb some of the forces this is pretty thin leather and i'm locking it pretty deep and if you look um yeah you can i can feel it but yeah i've got a groove running up there where i'm i'm actually stamping this deeper than my leather is and if i were doing that straight on the the granite here i'd probably be going all the way through it so we've seen daylight and one of the things i explained this and i'll show you an example but i i explained this in one of the videos we did earlier this week that you know what i'm working with lightweight leather there's two reasons we will usually back them to keep them from uh one is just keep from stretching out of shape but i i actually glue cardboard on the back or not cardboard actually matte board on the back of my leather so that i can get additional depth out of it as well and here's here's the example i want to show folks here's a piece of leather carving this is uh this is some arizona style porter style leather carving here and uh this was done on some about i don't know three four ounce leather and i stamped it pretty good and uh if i had this piece of cardboard underneath it and again i'll try to tip that up so that maybe the camera catches how much that design is actually imprinted into that piece of cardboard all right well what does that do yeah and you can you're here you can test fight if you run your hand on the back embossed on the back that's right it's pressed deeper than that leather is thick well that's exactly what i'm trying to do here with my uh my feather i want that quill to stand out a little bit more and and by doing by using the cardboard underneath i can get it to pop out just a little bit more so now if you were using a thicker heavier piece of leather it probably wouldn't do the same thing for you well you'd be surprised i i i back stuff even up to uh six seven ounces i can actually tool six seven house deep enough to get that same kind of an imprint in it um so um so yeah it it still works but again the reason there's two reasons for putting some kind of backing on a lot of people use like this painters tape you know to back their leather which is fine i know people that uh will take and and rubber cement it down to some x-ray film that was another one of those popular things people do but the problem is when you hit bottom you're bottomed out there's no no place nothing to absorb the imprint that you're putting into the leather so if you're not careful you can still go through it um and so it's just a way that you can get additional depth out of it uh you were looking at my business card case here tell people how thick that leather is on there it's stuck out is probably one to two ounces the heaviest yeah it's lighter than what i'm working on here and uh and you can if you run your fingers over they can't probably tell but uh it's got some pretty good depth in it i actually did that you can see the edge right there yeah and i i lifted it and undercut it and such and um and that was uh the reason i could do that is because of the fact it was glued down to a piece of cardboard or a piece of matte board it's actually not cardboard if you're going to do that you need a piece of cardboard that is that's not corrugated it needs to be like i've used uh what do they call it um poster board yeah well no it's got to be a little heavier than that um it's the kali that's what happens when you get old you go brain dead sometimes but what i'm using here with this is this is matte board this is stuff a framer would put around the edge of the picture which is just a thicker cardboard and so anyway so anyway yeah i got my my quilt popping out and you know what you can see on the back here in fact you can feel on the back that it's already pressed down pretty good so all right but now and you've got those lines got those lines already starting at the diagonal i need and so i'm going to go back to the other old faithful this is not really actually this is a hair blade and i've had this hair blade probably as long as i've had that knife as well a hair blade a lot of people i'll put this out one of the first questions people ask is how do you sharpen those things well i don't know because i've never had to sharpen one a hair blade is not really a blade it's a texturing tool it's for putting fine lines on a piece of leather and if you go watch one of the videos that i did earlier this week you find that i actually use this in some of my floral carving as well actually i'll run this over the stems and such of some of my uh leather carving um i don't know if i got an example here i didn't do it on that one but i have i i do that quite often to uh just add a little texture to it well it does and then when you do uh when you do a resist technique then it grabs a little bit of color too and so you get a little more contrast a little more color in your leather so there's that piece we did and i used it on there yeah yeah you can see it yes the other reason i use it on floral stuff like this is it actually then i lean it over the edge and it rounds off those square corners i have on my floral stuff so and a lot of people would use a back beveler for that but that will be doing about the same thing yeah the back beveler yeah yeah except i don't use back bevelers right where my thumb is yeah i don't use back bevelers either because i don't think you need to and i'll explain that though i have an opinion about everything you'll find that out um you know i i i never knew they had such things and i i've had people come up and look at my stuff and say how do you get that nice soft edge on there well when i'm working on heavier leather and i want to have softer edges on it you know what i learned i learned that if you cut just a little bit lighter and bevel a little bit deeper that beveling pulls that edge over and you get just a nice natural roundness it kind of sucks that yeah it pulls the corner of that it pulls the corner of that over you still get the same depth but you have the softened corners on it and that's what that's what i always did and then um somebody said did you use back reverse to do that and i have to say well what what's a back babbler well do you despise people who use the backbone i i don't despise anybody and and that's the other thing that when folks watch those videos or i'll just say it here i don't care what you use you know when when you get all done with anything that you've invested your time into nobody's going to look at your stuff and say golly i wonder if you used a back builder beveler or you know they're not trying to second-guess what tools you used um they're gonna look at the quality of the work you did and if it if what you are using produces the results you want you're using the right stuff you know i that's that's the bottom line some people get way too caught up on on i gotta have this tool or i gotta have that tool because somebody out on the on the internet on facebook said that you can't do leather right if you don't use essie and you know what quit listening to them quit listening to them learn how to do leather work one of the things i i tell people about this all the time um that uh you know a lot of the tools and everything that we use today um are really the evolved from what early leather workers created you know what when they they got into a binder wanted to do something on a piece of leather that they didn't have a tool that did you know what they they they didn't run over to springfield leather and get one they take a hitch pin out of an old wagon tongue or something well yeah whatever they had they figured out how do i how do i create what i got in my head i want to create and then they they either modified the tool that they have or they improvised uh with what they had or they created a whole new tool and you know what some of those tools are the very same ones that we're using today those modifications that's where that came from and you know what i think the one of the things that i think uh well i we have of today available to us the best leather the best tools the best everything that this craft has ever had available to it if there's anybody out there complaining that they can't do it because they don't have the right step well you just need to find something else to do because we've never had it as good as we have it today but you know there's something that's lost i think a little bit in creativity when you can just go get whatever you need they say that that necessity is the mother invention you know and and when when you get you want to do something and and you don't have what you need to do it you know you get creative it it spurs a creativity to to do that and you know the fact that we don't have to do that we can just you know go on the internet and get on amazon or whatever we get on and get it you know have it tomorrow if we want you know and that's we don't want to be all that creative to do that you know right yeah so i i think there's something lost when we don't have to do that that's the difference between uh well my goal is is to make people into craftsman uh a craftsman is somebody that that looks at what they got and they figure out how to how to make it do what they want to do um and i think that's we need more more people that that approach it like that so boy had a question i i'm i'm getting to him go ahead go ahead you'll have to interject because i'll keep talking if you don't know that's fine we had a whole bunch we i know you mentioned the post gym you saw it on there so there's some questions that we have gum come down some of them we've kind of knocked out what's your favorite sheridan style tooling use a tool that you have available and i don't hold yourself to a specific tool if you can have five stamps what would they be if i had five stamps you would ask for one more yeah i'd ask for one more yeah the other work you could i can carve anything i want to carve with the six basic tools that came with my beginner set you need a pear shader a beveler a cedar a vayner camouflage tool and a background tool those are the six basic stamps that in a swivel knife will let you carve anything you want and literally i could carve just about everything that's on this table with those six tools or at least versions of those six tools okay so then as people grow their tool collections then you get different sizes of bevelers you get different sizes of shaders you get different sizes of that so that you can do smaller or bigger or more versatile type of work but those are still the most important tools that anybody will ever need if you want to do carving if you are a stamper well if you're somebody that just wants a stamp that does everything for you you just whack it like a basket wave or something like that that doesn't take a lot of creativity um i'm not a basketweave stamper by the way i uh i i can't and i do but i feel about a bar grounder gym it doesn't take a lot of creativity to uh to use some of those tools uh yeah well yeah i mocked bar grinders because it's not my favorite tool for a background tool but the reason for that isn't because of what it does on the leather the reason for that is that um i think it's the uh a very tough tool for a beginner to learn i think a beginner needs to start out and and that's who i tend to teach to mostly people that just don't even know where to begin i think you need a tool that you'll get some success with and and i know way too many people that have thrown bar grounders across the room um they just they they take a precision that a beginner just isn't quite ready to to use so i think they work better after you fell across it well mine did because i couldn't find it for a while so uh do you have a favorite style of carving um it's style you said that now what that is you have a favorite type of carving that might be easier yeah no i i i i love all of it um no question about that uh and again you can look at the samples i brought with and you can see that i do all of the above i do the embossing i do i love to do figure carving i think probably the kind of carving i enjoyed the most at that if if i were to think hard about it is uh probably doing pictorial stuff trees scenery and that kind of stuff and and primarily it's well i find that just uh easy to do for me and the reason i don't do more classes on that is because um it uh it's hard to find some of those tools today um and or you without doing some modification while you were all asking those questions i want you to tell you what i just did here and why i did what i just did i just cut out that feather you know you saw the whole process up too that i got the diagonal lines on there i took my hair blade and i put it across there one of the things about using the hair blade is what you don't want to do is try to match up when you're when you're running it on here you don't want to try to match up each row here so they run side by side because if you do it looks like somebody plowed a field you know you're going to see these furrows running up there you want to overlap each one of these passes that you make and they're not running off of here at a 90 degree angle that beveler tool that i use started with a nice upward slope on it that's why i use that particular beveler and so i just take that same angle and i follow that all the way out to the edge in fact that's why i cut it out after i've done that because i ran that all the way past the edge when i was when i was doing it so i've got that texture all the way to the very edge of this piece of leather and then i cut it out and i'll just i should make sure again that you noticed what i was doing because i was doing more talking than explaining uh when i was cutting this out i had my i was using a scalpel and i was using this thing at a very flat angle almost like a fillet almost like a flay knife you can see how much i shaved that and why would i do that well i want people when they pick this up and they look at the edge of that i want it to look like a feather edge and so it does have that but that's still not good enough so where is here we go safety beveler this is another one of those tools people have thrown across the room um they're they're not always the most agreeable tool to use and that's usually because people don't use them correctly a lot of people use it like a potato peeler you know they'll pull straight like that and they do all their cutting right here in the middle of this blade at the lowest bow and um and because that it gets dull and so they keep changing out blades all the time but you know what it's uh if you'll treat it like a knife if you'll angle it so that that leather slices across that glaze it slices like that it it works like it's supposed to and it works really well and you don't even have to fight it you know it comes off nice and clean like that anyway no extra charge for that if you could grab one tool what would be your favorite one it's a swivel knife of course both faithful well a swim knife is the beginning of every design you'll ever carve in a piece of leather so you definitely got to have a swivel knife and yes i've done complete designs with just a swivel knife um that one thing i had here i hate bare leather and so when i did this little notebook here the back didn't have anything on it so you got to do something on there right so just use your swivel knife and create a design that's that's real simple to do um in fact uh friday we do a trading card thing yep stay tuned if you y'all come on back because you'll see me do some stuff with the swivel knife i might even show off so yeah i swear my the most critical tool um i was telling again earlier i i tell some stories more than once but earlier i there's a fella it used to be he was one of the last stampers uh leather carvers for sd meyer's gate his name is billy wuters he lived out in albuquerque new mexico when i met him but zesty myers was in el paso they they were the company that they used to have contract for all of the gun leather for the texas rangers and and uh you know in fact they uh they made general patton's uh gear that he he took to world war ii so anyway the great place and he was one of the last stampers there and and you know what like some leather workers not to mention anybody here sitting here but some of them are are cantankerous sometimes and have opinions that are quite strong and they express them loudly um and uh anyway he uh i when i met him you know the first thing he did when he he came in and looked at some of my stuff he's he picked it up and he looked it over and says yeah he knows how to run a knife and that was it it was all about do you know how to run a swivel knife or not that was my qualification we became good friends after that you know and i i could he's no longer with us but he's he was a great guy um what did i just do here too y'all are getting me distracted on the okay all right well i've got it thinned down you see how much leather i took off the back of this this is thin leather to begin with and then i just shaved that much more leather off the edges of that so when you look at the edge of that man it is really really fine and if you got some fuzzy stuff like this sticking out there well we can't have fuzzy stuff on our edges so they can trim that off if you need to but then still not quite done with this scalpel i love a scalpel too by the way when i was doing that flat cutting around the edge there i actually was bending the blades yeah that's that's why i said similar to a filet knife yeah it that blade actually bends a little bit and and it lets you go in at an even flatter angle so all right what am i doing now i'm taking down here near the base of the feather near the near the roots where it came out of the bird um i'm taking in and filleting i don't know i'm just i'm serrating it really really fine i'm putting those fine fibers if you ever look at a feather that's been plucked down near the bottom of those there's some wild fibers that kind of come flying little downy yeah downy type stuff so i'm trying to simulate that so i'm gonna gonna serrate that a little bit so i can get some of that kind of stuff going on and uh do you remember a guy named jack cox that might have been in jackson mississippi yeah he asked that already yeah i know oh that was before we were alive though oh okay sorry that's somebody yes i do i had somebody calling him out and say he was very helpful at the he was he was just one of the nicest guys in general that i probably ever met he ran a great store there in jackson was there forever great guy i don't know what became of him or where he is these days but you know that's one of the great things about the leather business and the years that i spent in it was uh with the people and and not not just the people i work with but the customers i mean leatherworkers are some of the neatest people in the world um they they really are they're salt of their folks and that's true no matter what part of the world you run into them all right i want to focus back here for a second let me let me try to zoom this in just a little bit more trying to find a happy spot somebody wanted it zoomed in a little bit more but the focus well the focus kind of gets crazy and if i go to manual focus and then when you try to hold something up then it's not in focus so all right you're good now i'm good now okay what i'm going to do next is i'm going to serrate these edges a little bit you know on a good day and when he has nothing better to do a bird will sit there and preen himself he'll take his beak and run it through his feathers and you know what he's doing he's kind of like mending it back together putting putting all these places where it kind of separated like this putting them back together um and i don't know if you've ever looked at a feather up close but it's it's like god created velcro before we ever did that's kind of that's like a hook and two thing and if you run your hand back over it it'll bind back together like this kind of neat stuff any feathers are i should say um so i'm going to serrate this in a few places like that just so that it looks like you know it wasn't freshly plucked and uh i'm i'm done tooling this thing so what do we do next ask more questions and get you on track yeah i know ask more questions um well i'm doing that let me let me borrow that bottle of uh what is it um rtc uh what i'm going to use next here in that that too uh what i'm going to do next here is i'm going to put some a leather finish on here an acrylic finish because i'm actually going to paint this and having an acrylic finish on it i'm not going to finish the fire out of it i mean i'm going to actually saturate it so that this actually gets all the way through it so and what will happen then is i'm gonna let it dry out when it dries out yeah it will um it'll stiffen up and that's what i want in fact i did that earlier so we'll see how the one i did earlier how it's stiffened up and show you where we're headed but at this stage right here as this starts to dry just a little bit here's where we want to go ahead and bring it to shape so ah they need to have probably a little bit of a bend to it like that and then these things yeah they need to be kind of flying everywhere so let that kind of fly like that and then these things along the edge they don't just lay out there nice and flat they tend to have some curl and some shape to them that's one that needs to be pruned a little bit this one here definitely needs to bring this is the one this is one you found on the ground that got loose so we need to get uh some contour to it like this and you can't keep that bow in it so while you're twisting feathers there we can see on the bevel and that burnish that you get yeah on your quill that goes up there yeah we had a we had a question or a comment um a viewer not able to get that same type of deepness or the change in color on the burners what what would help them well uh the first thing to check is your moisture content um when you have a thin piece of leather like this it doesn't take a lot of moisture for you to have plenty um i use my goal is to when i dampen it down initially is to get it damp about a third of the way through so and it took one wipe with that sponge there and this thing was already there so it didn't take that much but then as it starts to dry back there's a happy place where it you know it starts to almost come back to its original color and if you're doing your stamping and such at that stage that's normally where you'll get the best but the other thing that has a lot to do with that is just the grade of leather you're using i'm pretty sure i don't even know but just based on how well this piece of leather worked i'll bet this was some herman oak because it has nice burnish in it and one of the things that herman oak does in their final tanning process is they will hand rub some fat liquors and oils into the leather and that's what gives you that color that as your fibers of your leather are compressed that color is brought to the surface that doesn't happen unless you have good moisture content in it or the right moisture so that's that's why moisture content is important but having a good piece of leather is important as well so one of the things i found when you when you pick up a piece of leather and it's really whitish you know it's got it look may look pretty as all get out but it's really white looking there's our and they're those are usually sold a little bit less expensive and the reason they are is because they probably cut a corner somewheres and that hand rubbing of the fat liquors and oils is the most expensive part of tanning a height and so if you leave that out it's still tanned it's still not going to like rot and fall apart but it isn't going to give you all the carving qualities you might want we uh we sell some imported leather imported vegetable tan leather that i've tooled before and i can never get it to burnish and it it won't take the same type of a color that that the hermann oak does or or i don't know wicked and craig i guess is the only other they did that are left in the united states them and herman oak yeah they're they're you can get some decent leather uh out of the country too i i i'm not this wasn't a a uh anti-american you know what that wasn't that the the comment i was making uh there is some good stuff you want to get into it one of the things that herman oak does they still do pit tanning where they actually hang the hides in the in the tanning solution and let them hang like that it's one of the ways that they can speed up the tanning process you have to let just then the the agent you know work through the leather uh one of the things they do to speed that up in some tanneries is they will um they do drum tanning they'll put those all that stuff in and so you know they'll have it being agitated like this and uh and that does uh speed that up it causes that to penetrate a little but it also breaks down the fibers of the leather a little bit you end up with a little softer a little spongier piece of leather so then they hit it with the sheridan press and they have to press it a little harder and there's a lot to that so this one here's the one i did earlier and it's drier but it's still not as dry as i want it to be ready to uh color so i'm going to put both of these over there and i'm going to show you another kind of feather while i'm doing that well i'll go through a couple questions joshua's had it before and we talked about it but it was gonna have to be something that i think both of us kind of answered and can we team up and make some of the styles arizona texas classic and make them into uh cars rights you had you and your wife had dinner with chad and his wife and rusty and and lindsay kevin's daughter and i think some of that conversation kind of took place yeah it's been going on since sort of yeah we started visiting and and yeah i'm gonna we're gonna find a way to because i i do have patterns all that and if you don't want to wait for that there is a pattern pack that i i did that is available at uh springfield weather yeah it's uh on all the different regional styles of leather well they have a whole bunch of them but anyway it that pattern pack has um montana uh sheridan uh not montana i'm sorry i'm from montana in case you didn't know that um it has some texas style it has arizona style sometimes called porter style it has california style which sometimes called visalia they have a northwest style popularized by ray holes um what else um i don't remember but all the different regional styles and and there's some there's a couple of patterns from each of those styles in there so if you don't want to wait for what do you call carve rights carve rights yeah if you don't wait for that get that pattern pack and get started so another question that kind of branches off of that you mentioned texas style but there's nothing that really goes east of the mississippi yeah why is that i don't know that's why well there is a little bit there yeah there's there's there is a little bit there's some you know what we know about leatherworking came to us from from europe uh for the most part in fact from spain a lot um the the spaniards you know used to basically own california in that part of our country and when they came to this country they brought their horse culture with them and along with that of course you had the saddlers and the people that maintained the gear for those animals and so um that's why a lot of what we see has uh the western influence that's why there is a california style and you know it's because those folks develop that um that style out there um the uh easter there though if you look at uh and i think i have what is it what did i call it a victorian style i had that's one of the other things i cover in that that pattern pack uh and which is largely european they they were doing leather work over there and decorating leather with designs and such over there a long time the moors um did a lot of geometric type stuff and you see that in in some of the work over there i had the privilege of teaching some classes at a arts and crafts institute in vigo spain um i've been over there a couple times teaching and and it was uh amazing you know they there they that particular institute they're all about preserving the traditional arts and crafts the heritage of that region of the of the of their country and um the leather work they do it's it's magnificent but boy it's different than what we do you know now what we learned from that that's the stuff that we inherited and we modified it certainly yeah but uh the the the decoration and such that we see here uh largely came comes from the the saddle shops you know earlier on um you know the kind of stuff that maybe the the settlers in in new england and such they weren't all about making pretties on their leather they were about making something functional you know that would help them survive you know um and and that's that's that's why maybe there's not something heard about there's some great leather workers back there there's some they they're they're some of the finest um construction i've ever seen is some of the stuff that comes out of england oh my gosh i mean they they are magnificent uh with their construction um but anyway if you if somebody's watching from that educate me show me what you can do develop a style and we had a guy said he's gonna develop the georgia style there you go i didn't say yesterday georgie yeah georgia i think he did say that he was that he was not very good at the decorative cuts shame on you practice more work on it yeah um i did actually do a class over in georgia once and um it was uh i i took uh the was it cherokee rose i think is the state flower and i did a wallet pattern with that and [Music] i don't know where that's available right now but i have it anyway and and yes if you you could take something like that develop your own style with that it's a really cool flower um i wish i'd brought that now but all right other questions i'm gonna do another feather here but different okay we were talking about every every place that people were watching from we mentioned some yesterday so if you're out there list it where it's at who where over the world are you watching from i did folks often want to learn how did i get into leather working and where did the where did that fire get started and as i mentioned i grew up in montana i grew up actually on a ranch that was 50 miles from the nearest town which was mile city and um we uh montana one of the i guess one of the influences that that that affected me was um at the milestone salary it's one of those salaries that was well known around the west for being one of the great uh saddle shops out there in fact um i did some work for the uh texas cattle raisers association once and uh was in their museum they were actually looking to create a museum and and they had all these old saddles in there and they were showing me around and such and i um i said uh they were they were curious they said you know we got all these ones from montana first no salary and mile city i'm not real sure why all of those are here not more texas stuff and i said i know why i said i the reason that you have all those from that part of the country is because that's where the trail drives ended when the trail drives went out of texas those cattle were driven to montana that's actually the end of the trail in fact my city was the end of the trail uh quite often and um they uh um those cowboys that's also where payday was that's where they they finally got paid for however long they were on the trail and mile city was had a lot of things that was well known for the mile city saddle is one of them but it also had probably more bars on main street and more brothels than anywhere in the west and so those guys probably spent their money in mile city and they may have spent most of it on those other extracurricular activities but they did go home with a good saddle and that's why a lot of those saddles are down in texas now is because that's what they that's what they went home with so um related to that um a number of years ago well it was in 2016 i know exactly when it was um they had a a reunion of the cast and crew that put together that was in the the the film series uh the lonesome dove uh robert duvall was there and oh gosh tommy lee johnson dan lane everybody that was in there they were there they pulled them together and the reason they had that get-together there was um they uh all of the artifacts all of the the the props and the the costumes and everything that was used in the filming of that is in storage down at texas state university and so they want to make sure that that was preserved that it didn't get uh you know neglected and and maybe if they had a chance to raise enough funds maybe be able to acquire some more texas important you know things like that so anyway they were there and uh i was at that time um doing all the marketing for tandy leather and so they hit up tandy to uh support that which they did i arranged that but then they found out that i was from mile city they thought well now that's interesting i mean that's where if you watch that video that's where old gus you know died rob duvall he was in mile city when he died you know it's at the end of the trail and they found out that well you live here in texas now but you learned how to do leather work in mile city i mean you got to do something for us you know so so we did and i i did basically a poster size piece of leather carving farm it was uh something that incorporated their logo in the center of it their logo for their event and it also um had around the corners of it some texas themed uh it was texas style leather carving um and it that was uh um uh and then there was a big open area i had the logo in the middle the corner patterns here with the the floral and there was a dove down in the corner of course and uh but around the center that then where that blank space was they had the cast and crew to autograph that so it had all these different folks autographed on it and that went to auction and oh my gosh that was that was one of the most thrilling things i've ever been a part of they they actually um while they started the auction when they they brought it up on on today they started this thing out like five thousand dollars and i'm saying holy smokes you know for a piece of leather car and uh and it it took off i mean they were they were actually raising at a thousand bucks a whack you know boom boom boom and my heart's going boom boom boom boom get off that that's just that's amazing you know this this is going to be really something then it got up to i don't remember around 14 15 000 and it kind of stalled out and um they uh uh diane lane who if you ever watch that movie she's the the little hooker gal you know on there and and uh anyway i should have my cardboard under there i'm making another feather but this is different so just watch um using the same tools though so far uh anyway she she picks up this piece of leather and she walks around doing the vanna white kind of thing you know and showing it off in front of the of the the folks that were the active bidders on it and yeah the bidding took off again and it kept going and going and going and that thing finally sold for twenty eight thousand dollars wow um and uh it was uh it was it was a blast to be a part of that to do something if you want to i i have a lot of other stories like that of things that you know some of some of my most important leatherwork i've ever done got given away um it got donated for something i mean anybody that ever uh been a a tandy customer and received handy catalogs over the last 15 years a lot of those catalog covers are ones that i did and those are pretty neat it's an honor to have your stuff published and go around the world like that i guess that's why a lot of people know me is because i've had stuff shared around like that but so here we go oklahoma illinois arkansas kansas germany 30 miles east of springfield leather no germany's farther away uh let's see lots of people that have taken classes from you nebraska west virginia new hampshire wisconsin let's see where else georgia washington texas and other texas tennessee louisiana north carolina british columbia cool but anyway yeah going back to montana uh where i got started ken griffin was one of the saddle makers that was at the mouth of the salary in fact his kids graduated from the same high school i did and ken griffin wrote some of the earliest books on leather parting he had ken griffin scrapbook and you know real basic stuff but you know it's it that taught generations uh how to do leather work and that he was uh he was there so it was his style of leather work that influenced me when i got into junior high age back in those days they still had industrial arts programs and one of the things you could do in an industrial arts class is you could try your hand at a lot of different things including leatherwork and that's the first time i actually got some instruction on it and it was it worked out pretty good i found out that i really liked it in fact i was good at it and and and people started asking me to make them things and and you know one thing led to another and i i ended up doing a lot more leather work and then in high school now in high school i was probably more concerned about goofing off than i was really about furthering my education and so but one of the things you could do in high school is you could take industrial arts and you could just focus in on one thing and i could i i so i figured hey i'll just go take that and i do leather work and i can get an a for that without even having to work hard you know so that's what i did and so i i worked and that's where i've branded somebody that really had some knowledge about leatherwork and so um mr moss he got killed in the car uh when i was a senior in high school and they brought in his his replacement um and uh he didn't know squad about it so um he was uh they would send all of their students um that were you know trying to figure out how to lace or whatever he'd send them over to me and have me show how to do it so i was teaching people how to do leather while i was still in high school well you were a student well i was still a student when i got out of high school i uh i was working construction in montana now in montana construction business it's it's good paying money but it's pretty seasonal very easy it does snow up there sometimes and it gets cold anyway so it's seasonal work so i went in one year yeah we were laid off uh for the winter and went into one of the saddle shops in town there and um it was called boyd's boot and saddle they were actually a tandy distributor but they they sold boots saddles tack all that kind of stuff i asked them i said do you ever have anybody you know asking for custom work and they said well yeah we do but we don't really have somebody that does that so i don't know we probably can't help you and i said well i actually do that they they looked at me and i was pretty young still at that age that's a long time ago but um they uh they said well we if you want uh yeah we'll give you a chance um we had a guy in just today that wanted a wallet and you know here's one of these tandy kids if you want make that up we'll we'll see how you do and so i took that home and knocked it out for him and took it back to him actually the same day and they looked at it looked at me and said what did you have this already made or what and i said no i i just went home and did that and they said they looked at it a lot better than they were expecting and so anyway for the next four years i got to do all the custom work all the small goods you know wallets belts handbags small things like that i did all that stuff for that um that saddle shop and you know it was great stuff i loved it and i hated it both and the hate part came from the fact that sometimes people would come in and you know they'd want a belt or a wallet or whatever and and you know agree to make it for them and so the next question is what do you want on it and they would say well show me something you know what have you done and then inevitably they would pick something that i just finished you know for somebody else and that's what they want and i hated that i didn't want to do the same thing again i want to do something different every time and that was the part that i hated but it's also in hindsight probably was really good you know i i tell people in my classes all the time that you know how you get better at this stuff you gotta practice you gotta you gotta do leather work that's the only way you're ever gonna get better at this is you gotta do it you can watch me do this all day long but you ain't gonna learn it until you actually pick up the tools and put to use the stuff that i'm sharing with you that my knowledge doesn't become your knowledge until you use it um and that in hindsight you know i i actually that was good for me because i i did have to do the same design over again and you know what you can't do the same one twice without doing it better than you did last time i guarantee it or different or different you learn something with every piece of leather work you do but a lot of people don't turn around then and put that to use and so you know if you don't if you don't do it again it kind of slips away from you so um so i that in hindsight was was really good for me and and so i was doing and and i also had at the same time there was a saddle maker in town that did a great job with saddles but he hated carved leather and so he had me doing all of his full carvings and man was i making the money whoo um i i could do a full car saddle it'd only take me about a week because i'd have to do it in the evenings and such because i was during the summer anyway i was working construction so i'd carve leather at night and do this then i'd make a hundred bucks for a full car saddle i mean holy smokes and uh i was doing that in fact i was doing that one time we were working on a job up in billings montana and uh going to the hotel room i've been in hotel and had people banging on the wall because they heard this tapping going on i remember one time we had a lady come up the housekeeper or whatever come up and knock on the door and say you can't hang pictures in here i'm not and i have to show them what i'm doing but anyway i i was doing that and i in billings and i picked up the newspaper and i saw that tandy leather was looking for people with you know career aspirations or i don't remember what it said but um i said you to me i said yeah that'd be the perfect job i mean i could do what i love to do and if i could just make a living at it that'd be great so um so i went we were at that time we were working uh on a a job we were building a bridge with creo piling and i i don't know if you all know about creosote but it's nasty stuff greasy um i was i was wearing coveralls for in and for me to get from the job to tandy before they closed well i had to go straight to the job i didn't get to go clean up so i go walking in there you know and back then my hair was a bit longer probably in this area probably shoulder length and my beard was probably mid chest and um i i walked in there straight from the job so i'm in coveralls wearing a hard hat and pretty well greased up okay so here i come walking in the door and i said hey i hear you're looking for some help and oh my gosh the looks i got um and the guy you know he gave me this kind of a sideways look saying yeah right just came off the street or something you know and anyway um but he gave me an application and uh he said fill this out and bring it back and so i did and i had a chance to clean up over the and i took it in on saturday and uh what i'm doing now i put the hair texture on here okay and now i'm going to bevel all the way around it this is different than last time so stay tuned that's not your line beveler that you use no i'm using a regular checkered beveler nothing's fancy about that if you're a tool guy it's a b702 there you go um one of those high-tech tools um anyway so i went back in there on a saturday and took my application and i cleaned up a little bit i took a little bit of leather work with me and showed them that yeah i really actually do some leather work and they looked at it and they found out because see i told you i was doing some stuff for this place that was a tandy distributor at the time down in in my city and um they had talked me into teaching some classes for them that folks at tandy said you know you'll have more more business if you'll just you know if you'll teach classes and show people how to do this stuff you know it makes sense so they talked me into doing that so i was actually teaching classes i was doing better leather work than they probably had seen and i'm interested in a career and they said when can you start that's that's perfect you're the guy we've been looking for and so my next question is um what does it pay you know that that that's a part of the conversation and um the the guy said well it's uh it's minimum wage but you get a lot of hours and i said what's minimum wage uh because i was working a union scale job i i think then it was around 15 bucks an hour i was making it this would have been in 1978 that's a lot of money but you only make that when you're working you know you don't you don't make that when you're shut down in the wintertime in january yeah so anyway um i said uh anyway so i he he said and i think at the time was like 285 295 i don't know what it was it's less than three bucks 265 an hour okay my wife is here she's telling me reminding me because she was part of that conversation because i had to go home after he said that and i did you know that kind of a reaction i said holy sh smokes i don't know if i can do that and uh but anyway i went home and i told my sweet wife hey you ain't gonna believe the opportunity and but anyway long story short we the decision was made that yeah let's go ahead and do it in fact if we don't do it while we're at this age you probably never will you know most people don't do stupid stuff like that after they're older and wiser they only do that when they're young you know and so um anyway so i gave my notice where i was working quit a job at 15 an hour on a friday went to work for what is it 265 an hour on monday and uh thus i was in the leather business and uh but i was it was it was it was been good for me obviously i'm look at what i get to do now you probably got a raise at some point didn't you well i did i actually got to i got to go manage several different stores and i had a lot of success because you know people would come in and ask a question or they really had an honest desire to learn about woodworking you know what i could help them i i just show them what i do you know just like i'm doing here here's how you make feathers you know and so people people i have no problem selling stuff but i don't i don't just hit use something just to sell it i mean i i show people here's what i use here's how i do what you're asking about you know and so people respected the straightforward honesty you know of that and anyway i had a lot of success running a store in fact to the point where they made me then a regional manager and i got to oversee what 29 stores scattered around nine states i think it was in the rocky mountain region so i spent a lot of time on the road and the job of regional manager overseeing these stores was still teaching i mean i was just showing them here's what you got to do to be successful you know and it wasn't uncommon that when i'd go into one of those stores i'd be doing a collab you know after we got done talking whatever about the business you know i get to work with the customers and anyway a long story to make a long story longer as somebody once said um that that's kind of what let me eventually to texas because uh that's where tandy's corporate office is and tell you all kinds of stories lots more but that's not why people tuned in they tuned in to learn some leather work right so look at there there's feather beautiful yeah but it's it needs something it needs something else yeah so let's see what else can we do well while you're too along here there's other people that are at home that are tooling just so they could say they know that you're tooling live right now yeah so they're too long saying man i'm getting i'm just tooling right here with with jim in my house awesome yeah you know when kobet hit back in what nineteen two thousand uh 2020 yeah you know what i'm talking nineteen two thousand yeah well those years run together all right i think we just all tried the covet effect you know what kind of what kind of uh sorry before you get to what's the blade you're using your scalpel it's just a handle on it it has a handle on it yeah a scalpel with a handle guys yeah it's a modified one somebody took the one that you can go buy at a wherever you buy scalpel handles and then they put some wood on it and then re-ground it so that it's got a little prettier work look to it it works pretty good is it a clay no it's not yeah i think uh ed labair made that one is who made that one um anyway yeah scalpel and boy for this right here scalpel is the best because i really got to bend that blade and if i break one i'll show you how you replace those blades uh and i've been known to break them before but i'm going in at a very flat angle here underneath the edge of that and let's see where's my mopping spoon it sounds like he's been on a video once or twice with us we when stuff goes wrong it usually goes wrong yeah not a problem i know how to add live what what professionals do when something goes wrong you just go right here and say yeah that's exactly what i wanted to do there i wanted to show you how you fix things like that and uh you never admit you messed up you were talking about you were a regional manager over nine states yeah was uh colorado one of them colorado i was based out of denver colorado and yeah i was overseeing all of those stores and my first leather experience was with the candy store in denver over on sheridan avenue and sheridan do you happen to remember that store by chance it's lakewood yes yeah um yeah that's where my office was awesome who was the manager there i don't remember i was in this would have been in junior high school 84 well you're not that i'm not that much older than you it's been 85 that would have been 85 over there we moved in 85 yeah yeah yeah and this was much before that this was back in the 60s okay yeah no i was still junior high then too yeah um but yeah that's where i my uh office was and and worked out pretty good yeah i was telling liz a week ago in one of these videos she they were talking about my my head knife and my round knife and i said i told her i was at that store when i was in junior high and they were teaching the class it was in the evening time and there was a guy that was teaching the class and he had a head knife you know scabbard on his belt and i thought man that is the coolest thing i've ever seen was that john put on i don't know i don't know who it was but it impressed me yeah i said i don't know if he knew how to use it or not but by golly he had it on there and it looked good well yeah gotta look cool if you're gonna do this i mean i'm just wrecking the heck out of this aren't i yeah it looks pretty wrecked yeah we had somebody um that had a picture of your lonesome dove oh yeah okay they posted it on instagram okay so they shared it i shared it in all the okay i actually have some more of those posters i i did get a photo of it a good photo of it before i uh um gave it to them to get them all autographed so i actually have some poster that if somebody wants that it's great decoration for a leather shop i'll tell you what so just have to reach out and fix you up before we got started here you guys were sharing some names kind of back and forth of people that you knew and denny who you kind of have learned from and it was just fun to get to listen to you guys yeah reminisce on well those are those are some of the you know one of the other things obviously when i went to work for tandy i got exposed to a lot of great leather workers and in fact it was after that that i've got to finally get to see some of al stoneman's work up close and personal you know actually pick it up and examine it and see is it really as good as it looks in the books and uh it it was deflating because it's actually better um and you know that's that's the thing and a lot of folks won't and when they they look at the work you do danny or or don king or whoever it is that's their you know mentor that they think is the guy that knows the most about it a lot of times folks will look at that saying god i can never do that um but that's the wrong attitude when people look at that they need to learn from that they need to redouble their efforts and that's what happened with me when i when i learned that stolen really was that good i i realized that you know what i obviously need to apply myself a lot more a lot better to this see what i'm doing here i just i just ripped this up i mean i rolled that up with my scalp i didn't cut all the way through well yeah i did but pretend i didn't though okay no it doesn't matter on this because the idea i'm you're going to be looking at it from this side um and i i cut underneath i didn't cut all the way i'm not going to cut this all the way loose but i am going to now run a background tool underneath here to just kind of camouflage in fact i might have be able to do that with something bigger faster better like a matting tool yeah i just gotta remember where i stuck it here this one here works pretty good yeah matting tool but the idea here is to put a texture down here okay so that it camouflages a little bit that the the seam where i cut it loose and you'll see i'm not doing this i'll bet somewhere's here at a place like springfield leather they sell a gel antique don't they yeah made by feedings yes is there one sitting here in the supply area but i know where some is so well i just i'll show you how i finish that let me get to the coloring stage all right don't don't use any cameras and i'm not showing anyway that's that's kind of how i got to got to work for tandy and again i got exposed to a lot of great leather workers from that and got to spend a lot of my time teaching i you know some of the things that i've gotten to do i uh one of one of the projects i was real proud of i the uh i work a lot with the 4h4 which is a great uh program for kids and they they do a lot for building future leaders and such and i got to know i i went to some of their uh conventions well that's why i was in alaska that time i actually got to be at the starting line of the iditarod right here yeah that's pretty cool that's a whole nother story but anyway um i because of that my involvement with 4-h i went to their national conventions and i there i met the guy that was from puerto rico that was the um i guess the the main honcho whatever you call that state director or whatever and he uh said yeah this is kind of interesting stuff it's too bad we don't have that as part of our program down there and i said well why not he said well we just we don't have the stuff and nobody really knows and i said well what if i could help with that and one thing led to another and i got to go spend um i guess that's about 10 days down there teaching a bunch of of leaders what did you do well i didn't know what color you were so i brought these colors okay i'll bet one of them will work okay you have every color you could want okay so no excuses um so anyway i got to go down to puerto rico i i taught uh i think over the course of those 10 days i've taught about 84-h leaders how to teach leather work to kids and got that now as part of the official program in puerto rico just proud to have been able to have a part in that i would say you know i i joke i talk to my sister all the time i if you could see the the house i grew up oh my gosh it's it's about the size of this the entire house is about the size it had two bedrooms and then a main room that um had the the kitchen and a table and that was about it and it was like i said 50 miles from the nearest town so we we were not real flush growing up in uh in fact the the plumbing facilities was in another building out back and there was no running water um in fact we got our water out real well we had to go out and pump water out of a well our drinking water and we put it in a galvanized bucket and have it there on the counter with a dipper off the sides and anyway enough about that but i i joke with my sister i said can you imagine me as a kid telling my folks that yeah when i grow up here's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna become like this world famous weather worker and i'm going to travel around the world and i'm going to teach people how to do leather work and and and they're going to actually pay me to come and to learn from me can you imagine how stupid that would have sounded in fact it sounds stupid today too doesn't it um because how many opportunities are there to do that yeah but um you know i've been incredibly blessed to do exactly that um well you work for it well you can see that and and if people don't know this or haven't figured this out i actually enjoy what i'm doing this isn't work this is this is fun and this is what i've got to do my entire life um and so if it looks easy when i do it yeah it should so jim did bring all of his own tools matt's toaster is the screen name that's matt's toaster said oh you're using a rawhide mallet is that all we had to give you but you brought your own tools i brought my tools and yes i use a rawhide mallet and the reason i use a rawhide mallet is because i'm old and i don't learn new things the this is what i've used for like forever the one that came with my beginner's kit back then i couldn't afford a rawhide mallet i so i got a what their cheap wooden one and um it uh it got turned into sawdust eventually it just got totally chewed up and when i got one i went ahead and splurged and got me a rawhide one like all the big boys were using and that's what i've used ever since and i've wore out several of these um they have uh this one here is doing pretty good still you can see the wear on it but i've got some at home that i've i've sliced off you know slivers off the end of it to get a new face on it just take a hacksaw to it and and hack it off i've got some they get lighter every time you do it but they still work so um but yeah that's that's what i use is a rawhide mallet i like the balance i like the way it hits and that i shared this in some of the other classes i actually prefer rawhide over the polyhed malice because when i hit this it stays hit it doesn't recoil it doesn't chatter and i find that the polyhed stuff does chatter sometimes and for somebody that's not got a good grip on what they're doing it can it can mess you up so all right what this is actually close to done too so how's our other ones doing there they're getting stiffened up that's pretty cool look at that we've had quite a few people enjoy watching you relaxing to watch you robert says enjoy your work i uh watched your training videos and then he's from florence alabama and got to know jim marcel i taught him everything that he knew great guy yeah jim marcel makes a lot i don't know if he's still doing it or not i i hope so i haven't talked to him in a long time but jim has uh used to make a lot of uh firemen uh stuff you know like the even helmets but also the badges and stuff yeah he used to do like a ton of that i mean a ton denny do you know if we carry that background tool i have it here it's a craft japan e294 oh we have one that's similar there's others that make it besides craft japan that's that one's i've had that a long time that i think they're the ones that maybe first come up with that design i've seen it copied by many other tool makers but uh yeah it's it's a pretty cool tool and it does a great job it's the only i've got a ton of different background type textures that i use but when i go out and do one of these i've got some i got a lot of one-of-a-kind stuff i you know can you imagine working at tandy i had a chance to get a hold of some prototype stuff in fact all right truth in advertising here that old faithful swivel knife blade back around when they were first introduced to the leather industry back in probably it was when i was a regional manager so it would have been in the mid 80s late 80s probably i was in fort worth at one of our regional manager meetings and george hurst who was the uh merchandise manager at the time he had all these different uh ceramic blades laying on his desk he said hey boys these are this is what's coming this is this is the new thing this is you this we're gonna start carrying these and he had everything there he had a half inch and he had a angle blades and filigree blades and the quarter inch blades and the traditional 3 8s and all these different kinds of blades there a lot of ceramic and he said which ones do you think we ought to put in the line of course my vote was like hey the only one somebody needs to have is a quarter-inch straight blade that's all anybody really needs and but i got outvoted because [Music] they uh ended up with well the line that they ended up with and so anyway i i said well after they got done i said well then you don't need this one then do you and i picked that up and believe it or not that's the original that's the original prototype of that blade yeah it's so it's old you've never you've never dropped it then i have i i i didn't drop it but it did it did fall off my or i hit the edge of my bench with it once or something and i took a chip out of one corner and oh i was heartbroken i you know i went to the others but it's it's still it's it's the blade i like to use and so anyway i uh i uh one time was at one of these leather shows and a friend of mine jeff mosby i don't know if you know him but he makes some maker stamps and stuff and and uh we were talking and uh he's uh i told him yeah i said to get you know here's what i'm using but it's not my favorite you know the old favorites at home ceramic and i chipped the corner on it and so it's just i guess retired and he said what send it to me i can fix that um jeff makes some he does inlay work into guitars and necks and stuff like that he he like he did one for santana i mean he that's his yeah he he he's high-end with that kind of work and he's got the equipment to do that so he i sent it to him and he polished it up and it came back you know he refaced it and everything he came back probably working better than it was before i dropped it in so i've been more careful with it since then but yeah i use that i get asked all the time you know about that one and uh i i use it because it is my favorite but um i uh it is i it's real important that people don't think that hey i gotta go get one of those blades from somewheres so i can do leather work like jim i it that's just bs and don't don't be thinking like that because it has nothing to do with that i i was mentioning in one of the classes you know somebody said that they need to work on their swivel knife cuts well when i do swivel knife cuts in fact i guess i had to autograph these huh yeah i'll have to do that um when uh look at that that's pretty cool huh that's nice um but i'm not done with that how much time do we have do i get to this guy go on until i get tired or what yeah we're 12 20 i mean okay there's still i haven't had people or no problem going on and on and on um let me get the signature in here molly wants to know if you're coming to waco yeah just who mo somebody wants to know if you're going to win of course i'll be in waco if you're going to be in one of my classes though you better hurry up because um they're kind of so i had to have them expand the one i do on swivel knife finesse down there they initially had it set up for 25 and that sold out before the end of last month but they found me a bigger room so i can get more in there and i'll have av type help to make sure that i can everybody can see what i'm doing so yeah now you you just used like a stylus to write your name yeah and i did this one really large but but now you're gonna go over with your swivel now i'm gonna cut it yeah i have to have a tracing pattern you know i thought i might misspell i thought you were magic i am magic but he's making that really big this time yeah i know usually we try to see how small we can make it yeah some of these other pieces have some pretty small ones guys i don't know yeah i think we said something you can see this yeah you will never see his name but it is there and it was done with the swivel knife now on that one i did use a different knife i have i do have one with a smaller blade and i had to put on some goggles you know some uh some extra singing devices uh binoculars well you just have to have um you have to be able to see like a jeweler's loop or something well it no it's just one of those optivizer things but it it was good enough but um you know a lot of folks think that you got to have a special blade to do fine work and such like that or to do intricate carvings and things like that but the it's just not true it takes more than anything it takes practice more than anything dean said you only have about three hours left ralph says is there any chances to see you in germany or europe i know you'll be i'm going to cross the pond yeah i am headed to i'm going to be in norway in october late october i'm teaching a class at uh up in uh honor foss and uh so that's a lot closer than springfield missouri i know yeah all right but it's just a bunch of blank leather here you can't just leave it like that you better do i might need to add something here to it let's see what else we can come up with here do you strop that ceramic blade yeah you got to strap any swivel knife blade now there's two reasons well with steel blades the main reason is it maintains the polish on it which that's really important but i also polish my uh well i don't really polish it i strap my ceramic blade because it needs cleaning the very things that i was telling you about that fat liquors and oils and stuff that they handle that stuff will build up on your knife uh and and so if you don't strop it once a while to clean it um it will uh start to drag a little bit you know so when you strap that ceramic it actually doesn't change the edge no and and it shouldn't change the edge when you strap a a steel blade either when you're stropping you need to hold it like flat like this so that the the uh you're not lifting it above that you're maintaining that angle so you should never change the the edge when you're stropping i had a was teaching class in fact over in norway one of the first times i was over over there and i had people come from all over the place had somebody from germany in fact that was there and and this guy had some really nice tools he'd been doing leather work a long time he had a robert beard um swivel knife that was you know which are not cheap and you know he obviously used it a lot too but and we were i don't remember what the class was i was teaching but uh you know everybody got started i was going around to see um what uh how everybody was doing and and he uh i looked at his work and it looked like all he'd done is just went over the lines real heavy like a with a stylus or something and i said you know can i see your knife what's going on there well i looked at his knife and it's just rounded off on the end it was um you know it looked like the the end of my stylus you know and uh i said well do you stop that and he said oh yeah i do all the time he pulls out his strap and he he shows me how he stops it like that and he was he was been doing that now you don't wreck a knife the first time you do something wrong but he'd been doing this for years and he'd never had a point of comparison so i handed him my knife i said here try this one and he starts cutting with it he goes oh one of these kind of oh my god you know kind of reactions to it and um and i was uh so i took his knife and and fixed it but um you know you have to stop every knife and you have to maintain that polish on it um if somebody and and i i'll i'll see this sometimes when i'm teaching classes you know they'll be cutting away here and somebody will be going like this here with their hand you know and they ask what's going on they said well it's cramping up right here in the palm i said well get rid of the death grip on your knife i mean when you're holding the swivel knife it's a fingertip control tool okay so when you do it you're running this tool all the pushing down is done with this finger all the rest of these are just for steering it and if you're having to grip it with that tight of a grip to steer well strop it up so it'll go through the leather again i mean it doesn't take that much effort to um to be able to uh to to control your knife and if it is take a look at what you're doing anyway um so yeah maintain the knife not having tools that work the way they should i polish everything i use too by the way i polish my modeling spoon i polish my my uh swivel knife of course i polish my my stylus um you just drop this i know i do you can but those blades are pretty cheap yeah but i you know if you use it correctly it doesn't really uh needs dropping quite that often but yeah you have a favorite modeling spoon shade yes uh the one i'm using that one right there that blade shape right there and i should have brought it i actually have i said i have a lot of one-of-a-kind tools one-of-a-kind tools that one of the one-of-a-kind tools i have was given to me by a guy by the name of jim lind jim belind was an al stulman award winner back in about 2003 somewhere i don't i don't know that exactly but anyway great guy he lived up in montana and when i first met him i you know he we became mr friends because we're of course montana and so but he said you know he said you do a lot of well let me make you a modeling spoon he said it's just uh well i'll show it to you he said you'll be back here next year right and i said yeah so anyway the next year he gives me this modeling spoon and uh i looked at i said man that is really nice he said yeah now he said let me tell you about that modeling film he said there's only three of those that exist i said three what and he said well you have one now and i have one and she said the other one is the one i made for all stolen and i'm going oh yeah right yeah sure you made made out stolen smalling spoon um because you know everybody would want to claim that right um but anyway i was up there then at that museum if you've ever been to sheridan they have al stulman's bench and in his workshop and all that is up upstairs in that museum and so i'm up there one time i'm i'm looking at his desk so they've got uh his his tooling desk is there and it's covered with granite but down here on the sides are drawers and that's where all those tools were kept and of course i got them under under uh glass so that you can't mess with them but i pulled out that top drawer and pulled it all the way out and in the back of that sure as hell here's that modeling spoon and holy smokes i that really is and so why do i use this one this is the closest thing that's commercially available to what i have i actually have a copy of al snowman's modeling spoon and this is the closest thing to it but i've modified it okay i modify a lot of my tools um this one here if you were to go buy a modeling zoom from most places you'd find that they're commercially made and they have an edge on this kind of blunt like that and you'll never see that on the camera probably but it's it's fat as thick it's the thickness of the metal there but the one that i have comes almost in fact this one here i took this on a stone and i honed it down almost to a knife almost to a knife edge and then i polished that edge so that it's still rounded i can use this tool to actually undercut it's sharp enough i can undercut with this tool but when you go look then at some of the leather work that stolman did and i do have several pieces of his work in my collection and you see the detail that he got i now think that he did a lot of that really really fun stuff with his modeling spoon because you can it'll it'll capture that kind of detail because of that so so yes this is this is my favorite one it's kind of a spade shape on it and i in fact if any of those whoever was asking about madison one of my other classes i'm doing down in waco is modeling spoon finesse and i will bring that stolen one with me and let you all see that but we'll do i'll do an entire design in fact where is it here we go let me see that um this right here was done completely with a modeling spoon and a swivel knife this design right here is just two tools a swivel knife and modeling spoon what's the most important tool well i still got to have a swivel knife but that right there is that and the reason for this the reason this is here this i do classes all the time on pieces of leather this size right here a lot of the stuff you're going to see in my pattern packs are on pieces of leather this size here and i was doing this class one time teaching people and there's a little bit of embossing and of course a lot of specialized figure carving pictorial carving tools that it was used here and somebody complained they said oh i can't do that i ain't got that tool i said what i said i can't so i handed him my tool here i said here use my tool but let me show you something i said you don't have to have a lot of tools to do leather work and so while they were catching up with where i was at i did this and i used just a modeling spoon and a swivel knife i didn't draw this i found this somebody else did the original sketch on that but it was it was perfect for what i wanted to do so anyway and it was done with a modeling spoon like that so anyway yeah that's enough questions you have you'll get a lot of a lot of different answers here plus when you when you do that and then you say hey look here i've got two tools let's see what i can do yeah well and going back to the what did i say necessity some other dimension if you were sitting somewheres you had some leather somebody wanted a design on it and all you gots a modeling spoon and a swivel knife get it done you still can't you still can oh okay is there a certain brand on that modeling school uh i think uh i think you can i think we carry the same one i bet you do they're coming from ivan i think yeah so and i think that's who made this one visually but if it's like what i had when i bought this uh they're still too thick you still get moderate so i took that on a stone and worked it down and then but you can see the back was all polished up and everything i still did a lot of strapping on it to make sure it's polished up and working smoothly so anyway that's that's how that's done all right well there's our there's our three three feathers i think we'll probably end the youtube and the the facebook thing um there and then you want to do some coloring because we'll have to let it dry just a little bit this one we will the other ones are probably ready they're probably ready this year's ready to have some color thoroughly all right well throw some color on that one you need some paper you got some paint um i've got a piece of cardboard that works really good okay and i got a paper plate and i got some dye over here [Music] we'll do some quick coloring on that quick color yes well that one dries and then we'll we'll finish up over on twitch after that never says don't end it at some point jim does have to eat oh yeah but or at least denise does and she might be getting she might be pushing him out the door and i'll just follow him with a camera we'll just move it to my phone all right this is stiffened up you can see what happened with the uh with the acrylic right it's got some form it wants to hold its shape and everything so uh that that's pretty good that's why we use the acrylic but i'm gonna use some acrylic paint now and i'm gonna add some some real true to life colors with it and i've got here some angelus acrylic paint and uh that's a pretty good glob there i believe that's vanilla is what i get that's vanilla okay and then i got some dark brown i got you a new dark brown yeah so there's going to be paint that actually can look good look at it it runs right on it it didn't happen the other day no it came up close it didn't want to do that the other day and then there's some brushes here somewhere david says you ate yesterday didn't you i did i ate last night again so i'm good oh you got two meals in yeah right pretend within within the last 24 hours so all right this is actually pretty easy um to do we'll see how this works i like to use an ivory rather than a white i'm gonna do this kind of like a an eagle feather you know give it that kind of a coloration out and you can see that and i this is this is uh the angelus paint works pretty good for this because it's thin enough some some acrylics if you take some of this stuff that comes straight out of the tube it's thick enough that you'd fill in all these little grooves that i just made with the the hair blade so but this hand would see them when it dried yeah they would they would kind of you'd you'd lose some of the effect that we just put in here so um but using uh this right here we can uh it goes on there thin enough and of course i'm running my brush with the direction of the of those lines so that my the fibers of the brush actually uh get that right down in here and of course when you do these 3d feathers like this you got to do the back too because first thing people are going to do is look at the back turn it over oh yeah they're going to look over head back and see what is that no this can't be leather the paint goes pretty quick though well i'm making it go pretty quick because somebody said yo we got to cut this off oh blame it on me i'm not that's okay that's all right you said that was your the gym burns oh yeah i'm good at dishing it out so i better be good at taking all right i like to use um you know when you look at a lot of eagles they look like they're black and white well they're not black and they're not white um they're and i i like to use this here would you call this vanilla okay it's off-white basically um i like to have maybe a little more yellow tone to it which if i wasn't being rushed i could get that yeah i just blend some i usually do that i'll take my colors on i'm mixing in such here on the fly but this this will work you'll you'll get you'll understand so when you do this you got to make sure you get those edges you know like especially down here where you cut you've got to make sure you get paint on those so you don't want you know leather color yeah so pretty finessed isn't it look at that i had uh doing these feathers like this i'll tell you a couple stories on p um first one i i did some of these i had them hanging um for a little while i worked for a company called hide crafter leather and help them kind of get their feet on the ground and um anyway i had made some of these and had one hanging up it was actually had a deerskin hoop stretched and then i had you know one of these that was a little more life-sized um hanging in the middle of that and i one day this fella comes in and he says um are you native american and i said no he said well you can't have that in here and i said what he said that feather you can't have that in here he said i'm made of american i know what they look like i said well it's not a real feather and so i took it down and let him look at i said it's actually made out of leather and it's just no and so after he looked at it a little bit he said really he said would you sell it i said what yeah i guess he said the that's the way you do it he said well i have real ones he said but when i put them on my costume my dance costume um they get beat up pretty good and they're kind of hard to come by and um so i'm gonna use these yeah and so anyway so he ended up buying himself that's a pretty good compliment yeah about you know how how cool these can look um another story one of the guys that i learned a lot of this the embossing stuff from and um was rob barr and i don't know he'd have to be an old guy to remember him he was pretty active doing a lot of teaching session he really popularized the 3d embossing stuff with the leather putty and all that and was a good friend of mine he um used to travel about doing classes kind of the way i do but you know anyway he's no longer with us but he was a jokester he was native american he was a sioux indian and lived up in bismarck north dakota and anyway but he he was a good enough leatherwork he got to travel the world a bit showing people what he did and and and you know teaching classes and such and he was on his way to i believe it was to tokyo one time and uh he had you know some of his feathers he'd made in there and um and it was in his carry-on luggage because you know you don't want these to get crushed so uh and as you're going through there they they had him open his bag and said yeah no you can't that that's illegal you can't have those and um you know those are those are endangered animals you can't have those and rob being who he is he uh rather than explain to him that no those are made out of leather he's pulled out his native american car and said no i can have these see and and that was good enough so but uh so we could he could legally own weather he could eat yeah he could legally own those but um when you do these kind of feathers a lot of times when i see people do this they will um take their their darker color and there's like almost a dividing line where they'll take it up to one point and then from that point on it's right yeah but you know what what i'm doing here and what these are this is like a an adolescent eagle they they when they're born they're black you know they're they're pretty much really dark uh all over they don't have the white feathers until they get a bit older and and so as they do though they get white from the roots out okay so this is one that's in that that shade and that the reason i paint this one like that is because well that's what people expect eagle feathers to look like right that's what that's kind of the common thing so um so that's why i do it like this but when you paint these you can see i'm right now i'm getting the tip out there real good but then uh yeah i'm gonna wipe off most of it here and i'm gonna get to where i've got very little on my brush and i'm going to start trying to ruin this brush by just jabbing the model back yeah it's called stippling is the technical term but um it it it does a good job of transitioning that from the the heavy up there to the uh the the real dark down to into the white and then um then i'll do the same thing going back the other way you notice i clean off my brushes every time you sure sure bounce them in the water you sure wouldn't want to mix that color together and then i'm going to re-define that coil just a little bit here and i'm going to then stipple some of the what do you call it vanilla i'm going to stipple some vanilla over the top of my brown go back the other way so that it makes it really hard to see where one color quit and the other one began so it's just like bob ross you're just making happy little oh yeah there you go happy little feather [Music] yeah they're not hard to do really when you watch it happen you know none of this was called this but when you get all done and you tell people yeah that's leather it can be it can be it'll impress them usually so larger spots on anyway no other burning questions that need to be asked before you shut things down [Laughter] okay i haven't even asked you any fiery leather questions to get you worked out but i see the ending the video has done that anyway [Laughter] all right well there you go that's beautiful yeah maybe that's a better better shot there maybe i can hold it up there i'll make you hold it all right and you can still see those uh the feather lines your hairline yeah still in there yeah that's kind of a rushed paint job i know it'll do i heard somebody was trying to rush it all right well well there we have it we got some other recorded videos that we've been doing with you for the patterns that uh that we're carrying of yours and then we'll be back on friday to do the uh leather trading credit cards yep we'll do some fun stuff with that um just for those who are wondering why did i have you go get this gel antique i'd use that gel antique with a paintbrush and i'll paint it under here and then let that fade out and that's thick enough that it will further camouflage um yeah so it looks raw it looks like that most of the time people when they see this all done want to know if that's another piece of leather stuck on there so yeah well we'll do that we'll do that part on twitch on the after party we'll hang out with them the longer you already do but uh anything else you'd like to share no i'm not having fun yeah i wish you all were here i hope you're doing leather wherever you're at you know that's that's the that's the point so share your pictures i i have a facebook group called uh well elktrack studio creations uh i would love to see a whole slug of these feathers show up on there that you all made uh after watching this and put them on spring too friends of springfield yeah yeah show them show people what you're doing it's it's important you you all have a role in keeping this alive and exciting for the rest of the leatherworking world so make sure you're doing your part as well all right well we're going to jump over to twitch and uh thank you so much for uh joining us jim we'll have to have you back and do an unboxing class okay all right see you guys you

Channel: Springfield Leather

Views: 19,144

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Id: _57WxFwX5sU

Length: 108min 34sec (6514 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 27 2022