My SECRET Leather Patina Process // DIY Playing Card Case

hey everybody so today we're making a playing card case um it's been requested for a long time uh we do have game nights uh at the shop every couple weeks so you know it'll be nice to have around what i have designed is it's a very simple pattern kind of but we're gonna kind of semi-wet mold things and then i'm also building it almost like i've been kind of inspired by the projects we've done in the last couple weeks so um the tool holder the edge paint we're gonna build this like you would buy it at like home depot right so it's gonna be a little more industrial looking um i just kind of like that style and thought it would be interesting to do so first thing the pattern will be available in the description for a couple bucks but there's going to be no instructions the video is going to be instructions because we're wet molding so everything's going to be a little bit um when you wet mold things are a little more by feel than by measurement so we'll do everything in this video walk you through it and you can make along if you grab the pattern so we have our pattern cut out i have some 5 oz leather here now this pattern is for a standard deck of cards i know that the playing card niche is gigantic i honestly don't know much about them so if there's like collectors editions or special edition cards where the boxes are different sizes this won't it might work a little there's going to be a little extra wiggle room so you can get this in and out but we just kind of went and grabbed the traditional bicycle cards um so i'm making it so it fits with the cellophane on so that when you take itself in on you off you open up the pack you have a little bit of room to you know take it in and out but that's just a disclaimer so five ounce leather we're gonna get this traced out and cut so for this piece which is the main body piece we have a lot of little cuts here which we're going to fold up so you've seen me do this before i'm going to make some relief punches with my hole punch i have my rotary hole puncher sent to the smallest hole that i can if i had a smaller one i would use it you don't need a big hole for this but this is just to prevent ripping in the future since we're going to be cutting into the leather but not all the way through so i'm just going to before i make any cuts i'm going to make my hole punches and i'm also going to punch for rivets which will be in the pattern they're not in the pattern i'm using right now because i just haven't put them in yet but in the pattern in the description the holes will all be there for you so once we have all of our holes punched i'm going to take my knife and i'm going to use those holes as my starting position for my straight cuts so i'm going to go down just like that on both sides and then what that allows me to do is to get this cut so i'm not cutting straight into our flap here i can just fold that up and make my cuts and we're going to be trimming this so this doesn't have to be perfect this is really the first pattern where you're going to be doing that i've released where or that we've released where you're going to have to do a little bit more trimming than normal because we're going to be wet moldy and stuff but we figured why not give it a go so this is our finished pattern for now oh i have to [Music] punch out the hole for our snap button there we go now we need to get to oh we have one more step before we leveled so here's the sample that i made the final sample of this pattern and these pieces are these little flaps right so you can see it's kind of a semi wet molded project we're going to just dampen it and get this nice fold so that when you take the pack of cards out it sits nice and flat but we have all of the dimension that we need to easily slide the card pop the pack of cards in i like this little detail we're going to do rivets i'm actually going to add more rivets to this one make it look a little more industrial i guess i don't think i don't know if that's the right word but um so we're gonna the center flaps here are are the flaps that are gonna be riveted you can keep them straight they're straight in the pattern what i'm gonna do is i'm going to use my three-quarter inch end punch and a wildly oversized mallet because i don't know where my small one is i'm going to fold everything up and i'm going to round these off just because i think it looks a little nicer with the round rivets i didn't want to put this in the pattern because it's nice to have options you know this would look great with straight just straight cut as well and if it was rounded in the pattern it'd be a real pain in the butt to just cut so i would suggest if you're going to do this make sure you're using a strap and punch it just makes it the whole process much easier okay so this is eric here i have the camera kelina gave me this is our very dirty shop sink with all covered in um dye and stuff that we need to calm it out every couple months but instead of totally wet molding all i'm gonna do turn the water on i'm just gonna run this under like this i'm not looking to get it wet all the way through the back if you get a little bit that's fine we don't need it to be fully saturated for this because we're only making a few bends all right so let's head back to the bench so once we have our leather wet we're going to make a bunch of folds the first thing we're going to do is fold our base up and then we're going to make a little almost z and we're going to do that with both sides too but we have our cuts to dictate where we're going this one's a little more of a freestyle fold here and this will probably change a little bit as we continue to fold the next fold we're going to make is we're going to fold from the inside of this we're going to fold that in and do that on both sides and this is why we don't need to fully wet mold this um because we're not doing any curves we're not using a bone fold or anything we're just folding but i guess you theoretically could do this without wetting the leather at all but it makes it a lot nicer finished product if you do so you can already start to see that we're getting the shape of our playing card deck in our wet molding so this is going to slide right in this is going to be folded down like that and you can use a playing card deck to kind of get don't worry about we're trimming all this off so it's going to look a lot this is one of those projects i say this a lot it's going to look really bad before it looks good you just got to trust the process so you can see with our playing card deck in here now we have pretty much the perfect shape the next step is we're going to take our flaps and you can you could cut these flaps off and just stitch this up if you wanted to i like the flaps with the rivets i think it's a nice extra detail we're going to fold these over like this and we're going to rivet them but first i'm going to try to give these a little bit of a burnish i don't know if i'm going to be able to do it but let's give it a try it'll just make the finished product a little bit nicer and then the other thing we have to remember is we want to fold this in a way that when this is all glued together our stitch line is going to go down and over and we want this seam to be nice and straight because we want to butt that up so that you barely see it because we're going to be stitching right over that so just keep that in mind at this step you're gonna have plenty of opportunity to smooth this out because this is gonna take like an hour or two to dry um but we need to get these rivets in before it does dry so i'm gonna burnish this and then we're gonna get this riveted then we'll have a little bit of a break while this piece dries before we glue it to our backing piece with our flap okay so instead of using double cap rivets which are rivets that have a cap on either side right so they look finished on either side the problem with these is they leave a little bit of a bump and i know some people have collector's packs of cards that they don't want any dents in so i'm using flat um i think single cap rivets that's what they're called single cap rivets so the inside will be completely flat so that when the pack sits against to it against it i don't know i'm just trying to make something that um enthusiasts will be super into you can use double caps if you're just putting a pair of bicycle cards in there um but just to be safe for this design i would i'm just going to go with the with the single caps on the inside and there we go so now everything is a little bit wonky so i'm going to show you how we're going to set this up to get it to dry so as you can see we're already starting to dry in the top to get this to dry in the right shape all i'm going to do is i'm going to bend this in a little too far right then i'm going to use my bicycle pack and of course if you're mass producing these which you're totally allowed to do with with our patterns um you would want to make a bunch of templates like like wooden templates for this but we're just making one so i'm going to take my pack of cards i've bent this in too much so that when i put it around the bicycle cart or the playing cards you can see it's going to hug the sides that's how i want this to dry i'm going to smooth everything out and i'm specifically going to pay attention to this seam because remember we want to we want this to be seamless when we sew it there can be a little bit of a gap that's no big deal because all we have to do is that and that's it and then the next step what i'm going to do is i'm going to put it in a little sunny spot you can also put this in front of a fan um to speed it up it has no negative effects and we didn't really soak it all the way through so it's going to be a pretty quick drying project you can get this all done in a day you don't have to wait overnight for it to dry so i'm just going to do is put this in the sun and then we're going to wait for it to dry okay so this is all dry and what i've done is i've gone ahead and just done the edge paint we're edge painting this one i'm still on my edge paint kick and i've also edge painted um i'm gonna have to i had to do this by hand because it's too we're gonna use that roller thing that we used in the last video um but this is a little too tight to get in there so i just had painted that while i was waiting for this to dry so the next step is i'm going to lay this out on my cutting board and unlike most of our patterns because this is wet molded this is going to be a little bit different for everybody so i'm going to lay this out and mark my glue line now i'm going want to have some hangover here so that i can trim it a little trim allowance so i'm just gonna mark and i'm gonna use the guide on my cutting board the lines to make sure that we're even as this is lined up now we're going to glue here and we're going to glue all this stuff and get this all stuck together so to glue this in i'm going to take the shortest section you can see how this has a curve to it and take the shortest section of this and line it up and what i want to do is i want to make sure that i'm getting about half of each of the sides stuck because we're going to trim some of that off but we want to have most of it on there this will go there and then i'm going to come to this end and plop that down right there now the important thing remember we want these corners smushed in for this seam here smushed in as much as we can because we want that to look really nice when it's all sewn together and you can see we have a fairly even amount that we're going to trim on each side now i'm going to go in with my bone folder and just get this stuck down and for a little added reassurance what we can do so we can bring our granite block over and give it a little tap because we have enough room and really focus right here on this corner so trimming can be tricky make sure you have a very sharp blade a dull blade is much more dangerous than a sharp blade first i'm going to do the sides i'm just going to trim these using the corner of my cutting board here my pounding board here that'll give us a nice even edge like that and we'll do it on this side as well and you'll notice that there is a pretty big sort of border and that's because i want to add some pop rivets just for aesthetics you can feel free to trim this down more and trim the whole thing if you want whatever you you want to do with your version of this project i'm going to take my ruler i'm going to line up my edge this edge with my cutting board grid and i'm going to put that line that up with a line right here i'm going to cut it i'm going to put my ruler like this on the top and you want to go slow with this and make sure you know where your hands are because you can cut yourself easily doing this and i'm not going to press hard i'm just going to do a bunch of little passes to get this cut made there we go and so you see we have a lot of unevenness on this little piece here so by doing it like that it just makes sure that we get a nice square cut and our whole case is now nice and square so we're ready to punch holes for rivets and our stitching so spacing your stitch line using your calipers dividers whatever is going to be a little unique for this piece because we want our stitch line to land basically from where this bend ends to the edge we want it right in the middle so it's going to be different depending on what kind of leather the thickness of leather your wet molding so what i'm going to do is i'm going to use my calipers and i'm going to bring this in i'm going to adjust it until i get to the center where i think i want my stitch line i'm not going to go all the way to the end because i'm going to have a rivet right here so i'm going to start right about where i think i want my rivet and i'm going to pull down to make my first stitch line then i'm going to come to the bottom and i'm going to go for my second stitch line then i'm going to go on this side for my third stitch line and again i'm going to end right about where i think i want my rivet now before we start punching we need to punch our holes for our rivets because if we if we stitch and then punch our holes we can punch right through our thread so for the rivets i'm using i'm going to go down to the second smallest hole in my rotary puncher this is five i think it would be like about an eighth of an inch depends on your pop i'm using pop rivets for this and i'm going to punch my holes for my pop rivets a little off center and i'm going to go two at the top and two on the bottom you can skip this i just want to make it look really kind of uh almost industrial like something you would buy it like home depot instead of like i said i've just kind of been thinking about how cool that uh the aesthetics of that tool pouch we made where and so i just want to make a kind of super over built card case just for fun and now that we have our holes punched we can go through and get our stitching holes done for our stitching it's pretty simple instead of hanging our first prong over the top we're just going to hang it from the hole that we punched for our rivets and we're just going to punch all the way down and around so i'm going to use some yellow ritz a tiger thread this is 0.6 millimeters with our 5 millimeter stitching iron spacing that's what i like to use and i'm using the yellow because um you know louis vuitton we're going to paint the edges we've done a bunch of louis vuitton projects they use the yellow thread but it's just a nice classic sort of utilitarian workwear look they use a lot of yellow thread in construction holsters and that kind of thing so i figured it'd be nice to pair it with this but of course you could do it with any color thread you like so you can see that i'm just using this first rivet hole that we punched as a stitching hole and i'm just going to do that all the way around and like i said the reason for that is so that when we go back and install our rivets afterwards stitched we don't have to punch holes in our stitching and risk punching through the stitching and it also will if we were to just rivet and then stitch around it this the rivets i like i don't think it's a big deal but i like when you can kind of lock in some of the corner stitching with the rivets it just seems like if you can add strength you might as well do it so i got more of the little tiny rivets but this time in brass so all we're going to do is we're going to pop these in all four corners here and then we'll go over to the little wonder press and we'll get those all stuck together and then we will have a wildly overbuilt but super cool looking little playing card case so we are going to do some edge paint because we're really going for like 90s gas station gift stock gift shop vibes on this one but um first i want to round these little corners to match the shape of the the rivet and how i'm going to do that is i'm just going to use i'm going to trim a little bit with my knife and then i'm going to do the rest with the sandpaper just so we can really get that perfect it's kind of too small to to do just by making a single cut all right so we're gonna i promise i'm not gonna edge paint everything all the time now but i have been loving using this thing so we're gonna um give it a go to try on a pretty much finished piece let's put our trust in it see what happens so this is an edge paint roller it's basically a little wheel you fill the reservoir with edge paint you set the card scraper to keep scrape off the excess you're not getting too much this is just a little leather scrap we can use this to test and make sure that we are getting just enough and the scraper is doing its job should be good so the nerve wracking part so we have our first coat dry came out pretty good i did have a little mishap here but we're good um i sanded it down now we're going to do our second coat this way so we have our edges all painted and before we install our final snap and i'm going to show you how to do that um i figured it'd be fun to play around i want this to look old so i'm gonna take a little bit of sandpaper and i'm just gonna sand down being careful of the stitching of course i'm just gonna sand down where some of the high stress points would be and then we're going to go in and oil it so remember this would be folded like this so we would have a bunch of aging here and this isn't we're not going to go crazy with it i'm not trying to this is just a little fun experiment and then maybe we'll do a little bit here once we're done with that now we're going to take our mink oil and get some color on this thing now i don't have time to stick it in the sun but you can stick it out in the sun too if you're just using natural veg tan and that'll give you a nice dark patina basically right from the start because vegetan tans like human skin does so first we're gonna hit it with some mink oil we want to get that everywhere and you can see the sanding's not going to do much i'm not taking away all the grain or anything i just want to bring it just add a little bit of detail to make it look like this was something that someone found in a drawer somewhere that someone else bought 30 or 40 years ago and used a bunch and now we're reusing it because that can be fun it's always nice to make brand new shiny goods but i've always like to make things look a little bit old sometimes it's still going to get dark but you're going to see it's going to look like it has some good age to it and then i can go back and i can say okay well this isn't exactly looking like i want it to because it looks a little too new so we can go in and we can sand a little bit more in specific spots and then we can add a little more of our mink oil here really get that saturated in because remember we're not trying to degrade the leather at all just trying to add a little age to it and now we're going to install our snaps before we give it a final coat of our leather conditioner so i've installed our uh female part of the snap snap top and what i'm going to do is i'm going to slide my deck of cards in i'm going to fold this over nice and tight and i'm just going to press this down like that that'll give us a rough estimate of where we want to install our bottom snap now this snap will be in the pattern but i'm not sure how thick everyone's going to make this out of so you might want to omit this and do this later you do need a special anvil for it which i will show you in a second then i have roughly where i want it i'm gonna basically just bring this ruler in it's actually came out perfectly centered so i'll put my hole right there i'm gonna take a little piece of belt scrap this is very thick leather i'm gonna put that right in the middle so that i can punch this hole and you want to go slow with it because you do not want to punch all the way through your case and look we're fine then this is where the cobbler's anvil comes in so what this does this is an anvil i think i'm going to be using this that you can slide this into and then you have an anvil surface on the inside of your piece to set your snap like that i'm going to put my other piece on there and then i'm just going to use a hand setting tool to set this so the last aging step this is a little secret that i have this is gum drag you don't just have to use gum track for your edges you can rub it all over the actual piece itself it might have been a little too much but we'll go on the front too and what we can do is to give that burnish basically when you see patina on a wallet that's been used for 20 years or whatever what you're getting is you're getting the grain of the leather actually burnishing so we can sort of mimic that if we take some gum and it's just kind of like you're doing your edges you want to let it get kind of sticky you don't want it totally super wet we take a cloth and we just essentially burnish the face of our leather piece okay and here we go here's our final piece and you can see our aging came out really well now this is wet so it'll dry up a bit but you can see that by doing all of that burnishing and stuff we get a lot of the um the patina starts to form and all the wet molding and even where we sanded it you see we're not sanding fully through anything or anything like that we're just adding a little bit of texture so the thing that i like to do is i left the cellophane on just to give us a little bit of extra space while we're wet molding so we'll take that off and our cards will slide perfectly in we close our case and we're good to go so thank you guys so much for watching and we'll see in the next one you

Channel: Corter Leather

Views: 96,247

Keywords: leather playing card case, corter, corter leather, leathercraft, leather crafting playing card case, playing card deck box, leather patina, bicycle cards, playing cards, leather case tutoial, leather case pattern, playing card pattern, playing card case diy, playing card case pattern, leather patina process, leather patina before and after

Id: rWyLZ-ewnuU

Length: 28min 35sec (1715 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021