Tooling a Rope Border and the "upholstered look"

all right good morning I'm Erin Heiser makers leather supply and this is actually going to be the first of two videos that I hope to complete today ultimately what we're going to do is use our templates and make a tally book cover tally books are used primarily in the oil fields a lot of welders pipe liners use them a lot of ranchers use them stuff like that it's just a long slender notebook designed to be able to it's really long so you can have a lot of a lot of writing in it but it's slender so you can stick it in your front pocket or your jacket pocket or your back pocket or whatever you know a lot of notebooks are too big to stick in your pocket and that's why this one's designed the way that it is we've had a lot of requests for these especially being in Texas a lot of the oil field workers and stuff like that this is pretty much an awesome gift for them and a lot of them actually a lot of oil fielder's seem to do leather work in their spare time as well so I only turn out really advanced more um a lot of oil field workers seem to do leather work in their spare time as well so it's just a really really great project it's a simple project as far as there's not a lot of construction to it and stuff like that but anyway we're going to make this a two-part video cuz the first part I'm going to do what's called the quilted pattern or what I call the quilted batter and I don't really know what it's called but basically it'll look like the old like an old upholstered couch where it has the old ones that had buttons and them stuff like that material folded and creased down towards the buttons and stuff anyway if you clicked on this video then you already saw the thumbnail that shows what this will look like when it's done because that's what I'll take a picture for the thumbnail anyway um so let's get to it so what I have here is our large our template for the tally books covered it has three different pieces on it this is the back the the main body of the book it's got two interior pieces that'll hold your book in place one there well it's only one piece of plastic but you cut out two and one there and then this is the little card pocket for business cards or whatever that you'll sew somewhere around right there right now for this video the only thing we're worried about is this one right here we're going to use this big one and we're gonna cut out our outside and yeah alright so what I have here is a piece of four to five ounce wicked Craig russet tooling leather okay it's actually technically it's skirting leather that they've split down and the lighter weights for me I like the russet because with what we're about to do is kind of a geometric stamping type thing and it's going to have incredible burnish to it so yeah here we go using my scalpel I'm just gonna cut around the template like we do with their other ones probably should have put a brand new blade in this one I shoulda done some research before I made this video I apologize I'll put it in the comments if I if I can this scalpel was gifted to me by a fellow Facebook friend she sent this to us a friend of hers made it and she thought that we might like it and I do I like it a lot I made a similar scalpel some time ago and people have been asking me you know do you still make those or whatever and the answer is no I never made them for other folks I just made one for me and then this one couldn't have come at a better time too because I actually threw mine across the room one day and it broke so I'm very happy to have this one and I promise I won't throw it but anyway again when I when I can sit down and get the name of the person that made this I'll put it down in the comments and hopefully some contact information in there so yeah the rest of this right now is just gonna be set aside we'll use it in the next video I just need this one piece so they can complete cutting out my square here it's not perfectly square alright so there we have it there's our piece that we've cut out okay this way is the top yes okay so this way is the top of it so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna write top right here in the corner okay and I'm doing it in the corner because if I did it in the middle then it would show in the finished project yeah alright so the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to dampen my leather so that it's ready for stamping into little okay I've got a spray bottle here no I'm gonna do a few sprays I don't want to soak it I just want a good coverage of water on it alright and then anytime I'm doing anything that is less than this is four to five outs I'm gonna put some tape on the bottom of it anybody that watched my tooling videos and those I use scotch brand shipping tape I don't use the packing tape I use the shipping tape that says it right there the packing tape has left residue on the backs of my back of my weather and I don't like that that's what I'm trying to avoid is when I pull this off I don't want it to leave sticky residue on my leather it does and I have to line it and this is not a project that I planned on lining so I just evenly put it across the back of my leather I don't skip any spaces it's okay to overlap it a tiny bit if you need to but I don't skip any space in between that could be somewhere what we're doing is trying to keep the leather from stretching when we when we to it alright so there's all those pieces and I'm going to take my scalpel here and run it along the side and I'm going to cut off those end pieces of tape because they're going to annoy me and get stuck on my hand every time I do anything so just gonna go ahead and cut them off and alleviate that problem now it is very important however that you don't let this packing or shipping tape kind of curl up and end up on your flesh side of your leather because if you do it will leave a mark that for some reason you just can't get out and it won't take die right there in that place and it won't look right alright so there was what we've got now this piece of leather was a little bit rough so that folks can buy them by the square foot and everything I take some of the worst pieces and throw them in my own scrap bin because I know how to use them and it doesn't bother me at all but I don't want to send them to customers so what I have here is a glass slicker from Barry King and I'm just gonna use it and kind of lightly rub it across the tops or the surface of the dampened leather here and that's going to kind of smooth out any of the pores and stuff like that some people would do this before taping and they would kind of pre stretch their leather out it's not that necessary for me I'm just trying to smooth the surface I don't want to stretch it out I don't want to miss form it I just want to smooth that surface and I'm gonna set this thing up we're gonna do some fancy border work because that's just fun on a video it's a real simple border but it looks really nice and people like it a lot and it can really increase the the beauty of a project to have a nice border on it okay so I've set this thing up to be about 3/8 of an inch wide I'm leaving a really wide border around the very edge actually I'm gonna squeeze it in a little bit about 5/16 I'm leaving a kind of a white border because actually I hope to buck Stitch this project instead of just sewing it I think it'll be really neat 1/2 buck stitch and I don't have a lot of samples of buck stitching around my shop so why not so I'm just taking my wing dividers and drawing me a simple border all the way around here okay then I'm gonna open them up just a little bit more I'll go ahead and take them all the way out to 3/8 and I'm gonna draw another border just inside of that one now if you have a beater blade which is a small knife blade that has two parallel blades on it then you can use that and I do have one but I want to show people that you don't have to have one so here we are this is a beaded border now okay which means that we're doing two lines parallel to frame it out alright now I'm going to open it up to see it was 3/8 I go out to about 7/8 now you can do one more line now let's go further sorry actually no this this is now 7/8 I added at a 7/16 apparently okay let me stop because I'm getting my fractions all messed up this is 5/8 of an inch wide I'm very apologize it is 5/8 of an inch wide 7/8 would be almost a full inch that's not right alright so we're gonna draw this line basically it's it's about five sixteenths inside of the last line and [Music] yep it's a lot of swivel cutting and then it's gonna be a lot of beveling too but you know what it's gonna be worth it when we get the end result going on okay so now we need one last line because we're basically doing two beaded lines all right so I need to open this up another about eighth of an inch so that the second beaded line or the second set of lines matches the first set of lines all right that's pretty dadgum good now if you have a hard time cutting along straight lines with your swivel knife you may want to practice before you get into this because parallel lines have to be as straight as you can get them of course so that they stay parallel and what I'm gonna do is I'll start cutting some of these on the camera and then I'll cut others off the camera because I'm not trying to make this into a video my trusty swivel life here and somewhere around here my jewelers Rouge on the strop strop up my blade real good alright I'm just gonna start with the outside line and work my way in okay I'm just gonna take and cut now you can put a ruler up there and cut along the ruler we're actually going to do that later in the project and it can help you keep your lines straight the problem with it is it's really hard to keep them keep your distance as measured because of course the blade is not gonna lay completely flat up against the ruler that's why I prefer not to do it here when cutting a long straight line it's always easiest to cut it just with the natural pull of your arm don't try to do it at some crazy angle or something that it's going to be hard to keep straight I mean this right now this is just my elbow and my shoulder coming back towards me and it's doing just fine all right that was the first square cut out now I'm gonna cut the parallel line just on the inside of it all right this is the fourth line of the second border all right so there's what we have so far it is cut in or to two of the four lines let's cut in hopefully this thing will focus on it soon so anyway I'm not going to pause the video I'll cut in the last two lines and we'll come back and we'll talk about where to bevel these four lines alright so again aw did while the camera was off was cut in the other set of border lines there and so here we are all right now to bevel this what we want is we want those two beaded lines to be up we want those to be the raised part so we're going to bevel down the outside let me find something we're gonna bevel down the outside of this line the inside of this line the inside of this line and the outside of this line so that those two it's almost like train tracks going all the way around the project I'm going to cheat I'm going to use a push beveler I own two of them one of them by Barry King the other one back late Miller both great products we sell the Barry King version here we're currently sold out but we're hoping to have more on within by the end of the week but anyway they're they're awesome and they make this real quick and easy I'm gonna put my push bevel on it and I'm just gonna push it all the way around now I could turn it go turn it go turn it go but what I'm gonna try to do is maximize my time here so I did the outside of that line now I'm gonna do this line right here because then the bevel are facing the same way and it just saves me some time and I only have to turn the project once because when it comes down to it it's all about the time now I'm gonna move over here and do the exact same two lines that need to be the exact same direction there then there you go that'll be for every time I turn this project I have to bevel down four lines so I'll turn it 90 degrees and then we'll bubble down four more lines mmm if I was trying to get some incredible depth of stuff out of this project I wouldn't use a push beveler I would go ahead and use a standard beveler in my Maul and do it that way but I'm really I'm just trying to get the illusion of depth here and get the the beaded lines to stick up above the rest and so it's okay to use this push beveler and get her done quick so there's two sides done three sides there we go we're all beveled now okay you can see a little bit better now you can see where these two train tracks here are sticking up when this area the area in between and then this area are all what's beveled out okay so let's go ahead and create that border I'm kind of looking forward to it I think it's gonna be a lot of fun but first a very very important thing that I forgot to do beforehand I need to cut out some picture frame matting because I want the tooling on this to be extra neat so here I have this is just a giant sheet when I say picture frame matting it's literally the stuff that goes around the picture in a matted frame you can get a big gigantic sheet of it this one's been cut into quite a few times but you can get a massive sheet of it from Hobby Lobby for like nine bucks anytime I'm tooling anything less than about eight ounce once again I will use this stuff and I'll share with you the benefits and just thinking I got to find a pair of scissors and cut this out so let me let me pause this right quick alright I couldn't find any big scissors all I could find was a small pair so this is cut up free shuttle II anyway so if I use the picture frame matting underneath it then when I go to bevel or stamp this I'll be able to achieve incredible depth because it's almost like the stamp can go past the depth of the leather really hard to show you on a video but I've got pictures of things around or I've got things hanging on the wall here that were tooled on like 2 ounce leather that you would think they were eight ounce leather because of the amount of depth I was able to achieve and get by doing it this way I'm gonna get go ahead and get my leather sprayed a little bit with some water starting to dry on me yeah all right so what I'm going to use this tool is number f91 zero what it is so if I can make this camera focus on it it is a triangle-shaped bubbler with lines in it and I'm not getting the focus but anyway it is a triangle-shaped bubbler there's the point of it right there and it just has lines going down it all right and what we use this for is to create what I like to call the rope border I am not the person that have been at this by any means pretty sure I learned it from an old almond book years ago but what we're going to do is we're going to set it right up here in one of the corners all right and we want the one line of it of the triangle the long line - to be perfectly up against one of our beaded border lines okay we're gonna give it a tap that was a terrible tap but let it move all right now I will tell you this the one goal is we don't want to see the back end of the tool impression it's it's a babbler so all we want to see is the main part of the tool and then we want it to fade out into nothingness okay so I got that one line or that one impression there what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come behind that impression probably about an eighth of an inch or so behind where I can see the impression disappeared and I'm gonna give it another tap and I'm just gonna keep doing that all the way down again keeping one side of the tool up against that line you can use your wing dividers and perfectly mark all these and everything but once you've done it you times you kind of get the swing of it and the hang of it and you you don't have to be as accurate with your measurements and I promise it'll look just great okay so we're going down here I'm gonna get this one line done and then I'll show it off now the one thing I've never figured out with this tool and this border is going around a corner so what I'm gonna do is I'll find a different stamp or something to decorate the corners so that I don't have to all right and basically I stopped where it got to the back corner there okay now what I'm going to do is I'm going to flip the project around because now I'm gonna go down the other side I need the tool pointing opposite the direction that it just was going okay now I'm gonna try to explain where I'm going to put this tool but basically I'm gonna put it where now this long line is against the outer beaded border here but I want the other side of the tool even though it's going to disappear into nothingness I want it to go straight across to where I just did that other line so that the two together form what looks like a twisted rope and there's different ways to do this you can do it where they form a line you can leave a little bit of a gap and it's almost like a zigzag in between them stuff I promise if you got this tool and you sat down and practice it then it'll make a lot more sense than me trying to explain it and yeah being very careful today I'm gonna do a couple of these and then I'll show you what I'm talking about so here's the effect that we're getting I really know I've said it in a lot of videos I need a better camera there's the effect that we're getting right there okay so again this tool went it was pointed this way and it went down the tracks here and then I turned it around and I pointed at the opposite direction and came back up alright so I'm going to do this one line and then I'm gonna pause the camera and I'm gonna do all the sides of it and and we'll come back get where I can see better maybe yeah I'm gonna have it facing me so I can see the placement a little bit better of it and again you want to keep that tool to where you can't see the back of the tool impression so there we go we went all the way down it and that looks pretty dang cool alright so again I'm gonna pause the camera and I'll go around do all four sites that way I'm not boring you while you just sit and watch me stamp the exact same thing over and over all right so all four sides are done spray a little bit more water on it and again we've got these big blank corners right here so I looked through all my old craft tools and everything trying to figure out what I want to put in those corners and I found a stamp that I don't think I've ever used before I mean it's an old stamp it's definitely used but it's a fleur-de-lis the French anyway I tested it out it's perfectly in all four corners so yeah that's what I'm going to stamp in all four quarters so and it'll fill that little area really nicely and the top of it really is almost like a right angle 90 degree angles so it just matches the project doesn't give it too much of a French fail feel so that's good cuz last some things i Moyle fieldworkers gone one is a French looking notebook I would have said alright I was just kind of looking to see where my top was okay again we marked it so long side up I'm gonna go ahead and put these two stamps away and then we're going to start cutting our lives all right some people are really intimidated by this pattern because there's so many lines to cut and they need to be straight and they need to be parallel again we talked about it earlier briefly that's where a ruler comes into play this is our ruler that we make here at makers leather supply we have them available in three different lengths this is the 12 inch or here but anyway the reason I designed it the way I did is it's got this grid along one side of it and I'm not joking I designed this grid for this sole purpose that I like to do this pattern so to do our quilted look right here that's were looking for okay so what we have to do is cut these lines at angles here and then we'll go back with a stamp and fill the Centers of them there where the lines connect and yeah I made a few years ago the angle of the lines per se doesn't matter I have two basic rules I don't want them to be perfectly like the X's that it forms I don't want them to be square so I want like a narrow side and the wide side to it and then also I want it to line up with the notebook okay I don't want it to look like the the pattern you know like on this side we're doing it at this angle but then on this side we're doing it at this crazy angle and it basically looks like it wasn't fit to the squareness of the notebook all right so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna measure a point an inch in from the corner down here and I'll just use my stylus and make a little dot there okay and I'm gonna measure another point an inch in from the other corner and I'm gonna use my stylus and I'm gonna make a little dot right there the reason I just did that I don't want again I don't want it to be such an extreme angled cut that it almost looks like those are square so I am going to put the top corner of the ruler right there in the end the wernher up here but then I'm gonna move the bottom part down to that little little spot that we just marked that was that was an inch in okay and I'm gonna take my trusty swivel knife here and I'm just gonna run that swivel knife right down the ruler okay keeping it up against the ruler you don't want to vary from the ruler you definitely don't want to let the ruler move so here we go so there's the first of our lines cut now the simple way to create parallel lines to that you figure out how far apart you want your lines on are weilert each of these each of these grids is an eighth of an inch all right and I think I want this one to be about 3/4 of an inch what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn it over so that those gridlines are up against the leather and I'm gonna put the line that's three quarters of an inch in from the edge directly over that line that I just cut and then I'm gonna take my swivel knife and I'm gonna cut the next line right up against it and again it doesn't have to be our ruler but I really do highly encourage that you use a clear ruler that has lots of parallel lines on it and and then you'll you'll be able to do it this way and it's way easier than trying to measure and Mark all these and then follow them with the ruler so I'm moving my ruler down again so that I again have that line directly over the line on the ruler directly over the last cut and I'm just gonna keep on going I'm gonna be very careful not to accidentally cut into my borders I don't want to cut into my borders yeah but this is the easiest way to keep this perfectly parallel and straight throughout the project all right so we've gotten down to the bottom or the top corner I guess you could say and we need to make sure we do these lion the lines down here as well so I'm going to flip it around and work away from the center just like I was well to go because that's the easiest way for me to swivel knife up against this ruler and keep it straight I'm not cutting these ridiculously deep by any means but I am definitely cutting them I'm not just scratching the surface of the leather I want I want a good cut there but I'm not trying to weaken the leather by putting so many daggone lines in it that it's almost like a fold perforation all right so here's all my lines go in one way done now I need the lines going the other way I'm going to turn it back around to where my there's my original dot that I created up against that top corner there and I'm just gonna go the other way and I'm gonna do it again okay so there's the first of those lines now again I'll move it over that 3/4 of an inch put it on that line make sure it's nice and straight and continue to cut from there you can see where we're starting to have these really nice diamond patterns in the leather this is also a very easy pattern if you need to tool initials or anything like that this is a very easy pattern to go around that tooling with unlike a basket stamp that if you're trying to basket stamp on all four sides of something and have it all come together and match up at the at the other end it's it's very difficult but doing it this way it's very easy because you would just skip your cut across that and then go back to cutting once you're on the other side of whatever it is whether it's a brand or initials things like that the simplicity of this pattern and how easy it is to lay down is why it's one of my favorites besides the idea that it looks really cool when it's done a few more cuts so we're gonna move on we'll talk about it while I'm cutting here some people will bevel down these lines sometimes I do sometimes I don't this one I'm not going to I really prefer not to I think it looks better without doing it but it really is a personal preference and it's something you should play with and decide you know if that's what you like to do or not if you do you bevel down both sides of every single line and and it does kind of add to the idea that it looks like an old upholstered piece of furniture or something like that yeah all right so there we have it all of our diamonds are cut in it already looks pretty cool we could just leave it like that but we're not gonna we're gonna go ahead and and add some some texture to it so here's what we have they're called shelf filler stamps again my camera never does focus on the tool but I can get it to to show me their impressions here in a few minutes they're basically they're both the same stamp except ones kind of narrow and one's a little fatter so the narrow ones we'll use on the sweep I can remember my terminology the acute angles and the the wider one we'll use on the obtuse angles so the ones smaller than ninety degrees the ones larger than 90 degrees not bad for a guy that didn't finish college all right so all I'm gonna do is I'm going to take it and I'm gonna put the point of it down at the very bottom of the diamond and I'm gonna tap it and I'm gonna go all the way across doing it on every single diamond when this is done every diamond will have one of these either this stamp or the larger one in every corner so there's a good bit of stamping ahead of me here so I'm gonna do all these just one direction first that way I'm not constantly moving my project to get you know all four stamps at once so yeah I'm gonna pause the camera and when I come back all of the One Direction will be done and we'll start moving them a different direction okay so I did them all one direction it looks like I have a bunch of weeds growing up so I'm going to flip it over now and do the other edge so I'm just gonna get the same tool in my hand so I'm doing another acute angle another the small angles and I'm just doing opposite of everywhere that I had one before all right so there's what we're looking at now is these bottom couple of rows here I pause the camera again okay so tops and bottoms are done of each of them and it already looks pretty cool we could leave it at that I used to the one I showed you an example of while ago I left it that way but I'm gonna go ahead and grab the larger one now and I'm gonna do the sides so we'll do a row or two of them here pause it again bottom row down there's what's done you can see that it really has a lot of depth everything's flowing down toward the center of the diamond there so that's pretty cool I'm gonna pause it I'll do that whole third row or a third stamp and then we'll come back and show you again they're three sides are done now we'll get that last side done and this thing's gonna look pretty cool that rule right there is complete it looks like an old upholstered chair or couch and is one of my favorite stamps to use pause this again I'll finish the whole thing and then we'll talk some more all right all four sides of the diamonds are done it's looking pretty daggum awesome I went ahead and read wet the leather as needed throughout the throughout the project but now what I'm going to do is another border stamp on the inside wall here just to kind of finish sorry my finger went in the wrong place but right along here a lot of the time I'll use a small camouflage shirt or something like that this is a little bit fancier than that but it's still kind of a camouflage type tool and I'm just gonna go all the way around the border giving it a hit and lining it up with itself and it'll give that all those diamonds a stopping point I guess you could say so you can see it down there once that goes all the way around it'll have a very nice finished look to it and we'll come back when that stuff alright so did the border stamp all the way around it and we're gonna go ahead and call this thing done really wish I could get this thing oh there's the focus check that out so yeah there's what we're looking at folks I was going to die the bead lines going around it but honestly I don't really know if I want to because I really like how it looks just like it is I want to use a dark brown on the finished project which will be in the very next video I posted a I'm gonna use a dark brown lace and buck stitch around it so I may go ahead and die those those lines dark and then I'll figure out some sort of stain or something to darken some areas that way it'll match that dark brown bug stitch anyway hope you enjoyed it hope you learned something from it and yeah you can watch the rest of their the next video for the rest of how to build the italic book cover out of this so thanks a lot again I'm hearing Heiser makers leather supply and thanks for watching

Channel: Makers Leather Supply

Views: 159,228

Keywords: Leather, Leathercraft, Leather Craft, Leather Crafts, Leathercrafts, Maker's Leather Supply, Makers Leather Supply, Maker, DIY, Make it with makers, Tally, Tally Book, Tally Book Cover

Id: FxwmghAXxfw

Length: 45min 11sec (2711 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 06 2018