The PROBLeM with Hand Sewing Leather

hey everybody so today we have a highly requested video but it's going to be pretty simple one right we're going to talk about the pros and cons of different hand stitching methods with leather we hand stitch everything we don't use sewing machines and there are multiple ways to hand stitch leather and so we're going to go over the popular kind of ways to do it and kind of talk about the goods and the bads of all of them because they all have pros and cons so let's get into it so the first type we have a whole video on it and i'll put a link in either the description or a thing will pop up somewhere is a saddle stitch now a saddle stitch is a two needle stitch and basically what's happening it looks like a machine stitch i got some paper here so i can do some illustrations because i'm not good with computer graphics so this is the leather a saddle stitch is essentially one stitch going like this and then another stitch going the opposite way so it's essentially just a double stitch right now um we like this stitch because if one of this one of these breaks so you have a break right there and this whole stitch pulls out all the red the black is still holding the piece together and it's still very strong you can suspend 100 pound weights well 50 pound weights from this specifically but if you get something thicker like this stuff this is from main thread you can suspend 100 pounds of weight from one strand and this is not going to break so the reason it's called the saddle stitch is because this was used on saddles because it was easily repairable in the field all you had to do was get a needle go in and out and in and out and in and out and your saddle was repaired to do a saddle stitch we're going to go really quickly on this one what we do you could use a stitching pony you can use just your hands like i do you basically use two needles and you go in like that so you're going to go in with one in with the other and pulling tight and then you have good tension on either side now we use a method called the leapfrog method of saddle stitching which does the same thing but allows you to do it without a stitching pony i'm not going to go through that because we have a whole video on it that was the video i linked to but you can get a good idea of what a saddle stitch is all about by using the two needles by using the two threads we're able to simultaneously create two running stitch lines for extra strength and we're able to keep our tension perfect by pulling on both of our threads so for example if i were to just put one thread through and pull it you see how my tension goes out of line we have a straight line and then it curves because we don't have the tension of the other thread pushing backwards like when we pull both of them so that's why a saddle stitch is done like this these are some of the benefits to a saddle stitch now you also have i believe it's the french style of saddle stitch where you put one through then you wrap one around essentially tying a small knot before you put it through and then when you do it that way you have a knot in the middle of this leather so that if a stitch clips it's not going to come backwards i don't do it like that i just saddle stitch through because regardless you're always going to have if one stitch breaks you always have the other one like on our drawing supporting the piece but if you choose to do it that way it's even more strong and it can make the seam even more rigid the next popular stitch is called a running stitch and this is done not only in leather work and all sorts of quilting and sewing and everything like that a running stitch is basically just half of a saddle stitch so if this is our leather a running stitch we're going to use a single needle and we're just going to go in and out in and out in and out in and out and that's it so where you have the saddle stitch you have two of these running basically in parallel i guess even though they cross over each other running stitch is just one so to do that pretty simple you go in one hole and then you go out the other and you just do that over and over again so the risks with this one are if one of these stitches breaks you don't have the second stitch to hold it together right and the other thing is that if you're not careful it can be kind of difficult to keep your tension right because you're you don't have the other thread i can't even see the hole that i'm going you don't have the other thread to balance out so if you're pulling too hard your whole seam can get wavy but if you're careful it looks really nice it is a different look so you're going to have sort of a polka dot look on your leather piece you're not going to have a full stitch right but um people do this a lot with lacing like if instead of thread you would use a leather um and people this is a very this is i think the first leather thing i ever made was i was nine years old in summer camp and we just did a simple running stitch and my mom still has the keychain today so this is not a bad stitch at all it's just a different look but i think it's not something that a lot of people realize that they can do with leather um there's nothing wrong with this the only thing you have to really remember is the use case so if you have a business making leather goods and you want to have a lifetime warranty this stitch is probably going to last longer than this stitch because you have double the amount of stitching double the strength which means that each stitch is holding half the pressure of the piece i mean we're not dealing with construction here these things don't get hundreds of pounds of force applied to them but i'm talking long term we've been in business almost 15 years we see returns now we offer a lifetime warranty this is what you want to do if you want to limit your repairs that you're going to have to do however this one works just as well if you're doing like bags if you're doing um pretty stuff that isn't going to get used a lot this is a totally viable option and i personally think that it looks very focusing very nice so here's a comparison between a running stitch and a saddle stitch fully done now you can kind of see here i don't know if the light works super well but you can see how this is very flat and even because you have the tension of both threads working together to keep a nice straight seam on this one it's fairly even but you can see where you have bumps you can see where um you know this is compared to this where our seam here is a little more wavy if you like that that's fine it does has nothing to do with it it's only an aesthetic thing right the third stitch is when we take a running stitch and we do what's called going out and back to create kind of a saddle stitch but not really and i'm going to explain why and i'm going to explain why i really just don't like this method of saddle stitching bless you so this is our running stitch what happens when we go out and back when we go out and back what we do is we make a running stitch first then we come around and we go backwards doing another running stitch to create kind of a saddle stitch that's upside down the stitch is the same but there are some differences and i think it's important to go through them because it's a long-term thing that will affect how the piece is going to wear in some instances so here's our running stitch and to go out and back it's very simple once we've reached the end we're just going to go in the hole and we're going to work our way backwards going through every other not every other hole going through the same hole but looping all of these empty spots and we're just going to do that until we get to the end now here's the issue with this stitch i used to do this stitch i did this stitch for the first two years this is how i sewed everything um because i didn't have the resources to learn that a saddle stitch was an actual stitch just they just i didn't have any books i didn't have anything now the problem with doing it this way is all tension related and i found this out because i do have pieces out there that are 10 years old that have been used for 10 years and the tension in the thread when you go out and back is the biggest problem with this stitch because what's happening is no matter how careful you are this row of stitching is never going to be the same tightness as the row of stitching that i'm now doing coming back and you can kind of see it even though i'm pulling you can see how we have these highs and lows highs and lows highs and lows now what's going to happen over time with that if this is a wallet or something i mean a it doesn't really look very good so if you look at this is essentially the same stitch mechanically but we're doing it in a different way and you can see how our stitches aren't stacking it's kind of scraggly all over the place even though we've used the same stitching prongs the same needles the same thread and it's the same person doing the stitch so you get a little bit of a tidier result when you do a full blown two needle saddle stitch just right from the get-go but the second problem is the tension so you can see i think you can see can you see yeah all right how our original stitch that we came down is pretty tight but when we're coming back even though i pull our second stitch is sticking up now if this is a wallet what's going to happen there over time i'm going to come down here our wallet goes in a pocket out of a pocket in a pocket out of a pocket in a pocket out of a pocket with our flat saddle stitch all of these stitches are getting evenly worn but because we have peaks and valleys on our out and back saddle set or on our out and back stitched seam the thread is going to wear unevenly which means that there are going to be pressure points that are created where specific stitches are going to wear much quicker and you're going to have a lot more breaking so if you have these two pieces that are made into a wallet even though it's the same thread with essentially the same stitch this stitching i guarantee you is going to wear out quicker because of all these peaks and valleys and unevenness and that's why i really the running stitch is fine i understand not knowing how to do the saddle stitch so you do it this way but you if now that you're watching this video you know do a saddle stitch it'll make your pieces last much much longer your thread will not um your thread won't break down as quickly and so i'm just going to continue doing this so you can see i'm pulling hard as hard as i can trying to keep my tension right but it is very very difficult to do that and it can be remedied by just using it actually takes less time to do a proper saddle stitch so this is the out and back stitch and that is why it's not that i hate it i don't hate it i understand why people do use it i used it as well when i didn't know any better but if you can avoid using it it is much much better practice to get in the habit of doing a proper saddle stitch all right so our last stitch isn't like one particular stitch it's just any stitch because there are you know hundreds of different um i would call them decorative stitches that you could do and this is not specific if you're using leather lace this is totally different um i'm just specifically talking to any stitch where you're looping your thread around the outside seam so you can see i have two pieces of leather here and i'm just using a whip stitch which is i don't you wouldn't you know people don't usually use this in leather work but sometimes they do um to just put this seam together right the problem with this and this is going to extrapolate out to a very common thing that a lot of people including us do on some of our leather pieces we'll do a saddle stitch like this but that at the end we'll wrap it around the outside seam that's ok it's not super problematic but what you do need to realize is anytime you put thread over the top of an outside seam guess what's going to happen you've been watching this far you probably already know what i'm going to say when this gets put into use that thread is the first thing that's going to contact the ground the side of someone's pocket the seat the wall if it's a bag that's being hung so you have to be very cognizant of where you put these style stitches or where you loop stitches over right so for example if you're if this is a wallet i'm probably not going to want anything on an exterior seam but if i have an interior seam with a pocket that's not going to get rubbed up against i can loop that over all i want and i know that it's not really going to get any abrasion or there isn't going to be it's not going to be abrasive i don't know i don't know how to use the right word nothing's going to rub up against it and break it whereas if we're on the outside seam this thing is going to get just abused every day and you're pretty much just asking for trouble down the road and it happens fairly quickly whereas with the saddle stitch you have no stitching you have no stitches here you have no thread to worry about you can rub on you this can it's only going to get better yeah it burnishes really um whereas if you have even just one little stitch um wrapped around here once that breaks it's a saddle stitch so you know you can your customer whoever is carrying it can tie it off but it is going to be need to be repaired now if you want to do this on the inside of a bag if you want to do let's see we say we want to sew these flat like this and you want to do a whip stitch like that that's fine just hammer it down and it's in the middle of the piece but if you have stitching going over your outside seams that is something to keep track of the other thing i don't really know how to do it by hand but there's um a lot of people will do like the decorative sort of i think it's like a nordic stitch but it's essentially a chain stitch if you're using thicker thread that raises your stitching up it's going to do the same thing even though it doesn't cross over so just be careful it's very pretty i i don't know i don't hate it i love the look of these decorative stitches but in practice sometimes i'll see pictures where i'm like that's really beautiful but if it gets used that stitching is going to fray and snap in a year of use so it's just something to think about and with that i think that's pretty much where we're going to end it i mean you guys know that we mostly use saddle stitching i think that it's important as a beginner myself that went down this route to point out that there are better way don't even bother learning to stitch this way it's just as easy to do a proper saddle stitch it's much stronger and your pieces will last much longer and it's about learning proper technique you don't want to start out with bad habits that you have to unlearn before you learn the proper habits a second time so again i'm going to put our saddle stitching tutorial you don't uh in the comment in the description you don't need a stitching pony for the way that we do it if you want to use a stitching pony go for it um and if you're going to do decorative stitching just make sure that you're cognizant of where that stitching is going to land on the piece you're making to make sure that it's not going to break quickly once it gets put into use all right so that's gonna be about it um fairly simple but i think an important small video to make uh let us know in the comments which stitching you prefer how you guys do it i'm really interested to know like what the the more popular stitching methods are because obviously we love making content for you um and if you all are out there doing something that we're not even aware of i'm happy to learn and i'm happy to incorporate into our projects so that you can then get patterns and make stuff that you like so have a good holiday i think this is coming out on christmas but regardless what holiday you're celebrating hope everyone's having a happy and healthy end of their year and we'll see in the next one you

Channel: Corter Leather

Views: 189,477

Keywords: The PROBLEM with Hand Sewing leather, corter, corter leather, saddle stitch, saddle stitch tutorial, hand sewing leather, how to hand sew leather, how to saddle stitch leather, how to saddle stitch by hand, hand sew leather, hand sew leather needle, leathercrafting, leathercrafts, leather craft, leather, leather work, workbench, leather workshop

Id: QTVPoVoSI2Y

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 24 2021