TWO New Stitches to Elevate your Leathercraft!

hey everybody so we had a big long three-part project uh the last couple weeks so today i figured we'd make just something simple but that explores um a couple different stitching techniques that we haven't really gotten into because honestly i don't do them too much but once you learn how to do them they kind of unlock a whole plethora of different projects three-dimensionally that you can make and we're going to explore the butt joint and the box joint today by making just a simple cylindrical pen holder so i have some scrap from the bag that we used last week and this is going to be really good to practice butt joints and box joints if you've never done them because you want something that's a little bit thicker you can do these joints on thin leathers with some practice but what we're going to be doing is we're actually we're not going to be going through this way we're going to be going through at an angle on some of these and if you use like a 5 6 ounce leather it's going to let you have give you plenty of room to get your all through so i'm using um i have my calipers set we're gonna make a cylinder i'm using um this is set to an inch and a half which will give us a three inch circle that's going to be our base so i'm just going to trace out on the flesh side not the grain side a three inch circle and we'll cut this out and you want to be careful that you're not you can dull these down since this is just practice i'm just using the ones that i always use but you don't want to push all the way through so you have a hole in the back just be light with it or use a three-inch template to print out on your computer and then i'm going to cut this out first so i have a four inch strip of leather for my walls i want to be four inches tall and all i did was um because i don't have a pattern or anything i just kind of wrapped it around the cylinder or the circle that i cut to form the cylinder and marked where i wanted to end and you can see that's going to match perfectly now you can join this seam in many ways you can do like a baseball stitch you can do like loop it around but what we want to do is a butt joint what a butt joint is it's going to look pretty much just like any other saddle stitch on both sides that's the we want to do that first before we attach it to the base but we have to punch everything on this piece and on this piece before we start assembling everything so first thing we're going to do is i'm going to finish the edges because once this is together you can't you can burnish a little bit but it's much easier to do everything first so on my top since i'm not going to have any stitching at all which of course you could just do a a stitch just for aesthetics i'm going to bevel both sides so it'll be nice and rounded and i'm also going to do that on the bottom so i'm gonna burnish all four sides i'm not gonna bevel the two sides where i'm gonna do my butt joint but i am gonna burnish them just so that when i put them together it looks a little bit neater even though we're going to be punching holes through these sides you know it just makes it keeps it nice and tidy so i have these burnished i'm just using gum drag and my canvas like i always do and i'm going to burnish the top now and then the last thing i'm going to do is i'm going to burnish the circular base as well and i'm going to treat that similar to the butt joints on this piece so these sides i'm not going to bevel anything i'm just going to burnish it and you can do a little bit of sandpaper if your circular cut isn't perfect so now it's time to lay out our stitches i have my other divider set with my normal let's see if i can get a measurement for you because a lot of people always ask i am going one about three millimeters from the edge on this and i'm gonna go around my bottom and then on the sort of body piece we're only going to do three sides now circles they're not hard just take your time and kind of rotate i like to rotate the piece and that'll get us a nice line pick your top doesn't matter which i'm going to go with this is the top so i'm going to start here i'm not going to go all the way to the top here i'm going to go a little bit below it then i'm going to do my whole bottom and then i'm going to do the other side and the same i'm going to stop a little bit above the top there so there are a couple different types of awls if you are using if you're used to using pricking irons then you're probably only using a scratch hall now this is a round point at all and it's only really meant for tracing out patterns the other type of all is a diamond doll and this is for um french style leatherwork mostly hermes uses it this one's very old and really messed up but i've been using it for gosh 15 years when i do this type of work and it's never let me down so with this sort of all you have more it's not the same profile but you have a diamond profile similar to a diamond stitching chisel and you strop it just like you would a a skiving knife but you do it on all four sides this one's already fairly stroked um this is just some stripping compound on some veg tan and the way that we're going to do this is we're going to start first with our butt joint so the butt joint is going to be the joint that puts both of these together like this so we don't want to see any stitches on the inside and we don't want to do any looping around now most people are used to punching all the way through with the stitching irons we're actually and this is how it's done in uh french leather work sometimes too we're only going to use these to mark our stitches and you can use an over stitch wheel for this too if you have one so what i'm going to do is to make sure that our stitches line up i'm going to hang my first prong over the end of the top of my piece and then i'm gonna use that as the spacing and i'm just using hand pressure to make little marks i'm not going really deep into the leather and i'm gonna do that on both sides now for a butt joint all of the stitches on both sides we're going to come in with our diamond awl and we're going to punch our holes at a 45 degree angle but for a box joint we need one piece at a 45 degree punch to the 45 the other piece can be punched all the way through like normal so for this piece because we have to get all the stitches punched out before we start assembling i'm going to go down now and i'm just going to punch through like this is a wallet or a bag or anything just boom boom boom boom straight through at a 90 degree angle to the edge of the leather now for our circular piece we're going to mark our stitches out just like we did on the sides of our body piece for our butt joint this is going to be the box joint i'm using my two prong stitching iron because it's a full curve and that will allow us to mark even stitches around the whole curve and i'm also using the same spacing for both my body piece and my base piece now what you can do is you can use a larger spacing for your body piece and a smaller spacing for this base piece because we're going to end up and i'll show you how to do it you're going to end up having to skip stitches to keep up with the stitching because you just naturally have a longer piece around the outside but i'm just going to show you how to skip the stitches because it is a little bit of work to match up the right two sets of stitching irons to do it the other way so the first thing i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna go around take my time and i'm just putting one prong in the existing hole and the second prong i'm making my new mark and that will ensure that every single hole is evenly spaced so now comes the part where we have to punch our 45s and it kind of feels daunting but it's actually pretty i find it pretty relaxing and pretty fun you just want to make sure that you have a nice uh burn a polished all blade and you want to hold it at the right angle so let me get here we go here's some scrap and here is a little line of stitches all right so our goal is to punch from here through the flesh of our leather here now you want to make sure that you're holding your awl straight and as you can see if you hold all straight you get a nice little hole that goes all the way through if you're holding your all at an angle what will happen is you'll cut basically because these are very sharp you'll cut basically a little line sideways like this and when you stitch this will come up and it won't look very good and it can rip over time so we want to make sure that we're holding it as best we can and that we're not too far away from the edge now we can tap this down with a hammer after we're all stitched up and flatten that all nice totally good and all of our holes are coming through the edge here but i would suggest if you've never done this before grab some scrap and just practice it it's not very hard and once you kind of unlock this and have this in your bag of tricks um you can make so much cool stuff with it so i like to do these punches into a cutting mat because i find that if i do them off the edge like this i tend to and this is a personal thing but i tend to push my all too far so when i do them into a cutting mat what happens is i know that once i hit the cutting mat my stitch is good and i'm just going to work my way down and you can see how with practice you get the perfect angle to hold your you're all at so you can get every single one at the right angle or at the at the same angle you can also see how i'm not going in an angle i'm going in straight so that we're not getting you know we're a little bumpy but we're not getting any of those cuts or anything like that because we're not at an angle and then this last one has a hole that goes through for our bottom but i'm also going to punch one at a side now we just flip it over and we do our other side so now that we have all of our holes punched i just have a needle here and you can see the path that the stitch is going to take it's going to come right in the middle of the flesh which is okay because the grain is our real strength here so this is basically just like if you had a two ounce leather you're getting that same strength and you can see because we use that cutting board as our stopping point we pretty much have the same exit point right in the middle on every single one of our holes and that is a thing that takes practice so i would encourage if you want to learn this stitch to just get a bunch of scrap you know that's my favorite way to tell you guys how to practice get a bunch of scrap and just practice this over and over and over again until you have the muscle memory where you know exactly how to hold the awl and it doesn't take much time at all it's not a super hard thing to learn but you can see that all of our stitches are now coming out directly in the middle of this seam and they'll come out in the middle of the other seam too so when we stitch them together you're never going to see any thread on the inside of our pencil cup and it also helps if you're just learning to use a hot stuff leather because there are lots of oils in this leather that are going to help your blade glide through nice and smoothly whereas some veg tins are a little dry and the last thing you want while you're learning how to do this is to be struggling pushing this all through so with the circle what i like to do is i just i make sure i get my grip right and i like to put i use kind of a long all on on a box joint this is not punching through on a stitching pony just on a box joint like this i like a long all that i can rest in the palm of my hand so that my fingers are only doing sort of the directing and my arm is doing the pushing you shouldn't have to push hard you want your blade to be nice and smooth and sharp with a circular one i'm going to basically do what i did with the last one i'm going to punch through like that then i'm going to rotate my piece a little bit so that i'm always punching directly through every single hole i'm gonna rotate the piece and it helps to use a cutting board with marks in it because i know so this is my little line that i'm lining up with every hole i'm just rotating to line up with that line first thing we're going to do is we're going to sew up the butt joint on the body of the cup what i like to do is i take a little bit of painters tape and i put it on one side and then i fold this over and i actually think i learned this from a youtube video a few years ago i forget who made it but thank you for that video and we're gonna put this on the other side like so and then depending on the leather um you can fold it over if it's going to tear up i'll have you using like a sort of a delicate leather you want to be careful but um then i'll usually rip this put this kind of right there and right there and it looks weird but it does the trick just enough you can see when this is bent in that all of our holes line up and it's just kind of an extra hair pair of hands i'm going to use some white ritz a tiger thread just so we can see it on camera of course if you wanted to do a matching brown whatever go for it so i'm starting my first hole i'm going to kind of wiggle through to my first hole on the other side get that up through sorry my second hole get that up through and pull my needles so that they're even and then it's just like any other saddle stitch just like a little bit sideways and after every stitch we're going to pull tight to get that seam nice and tight so so for a backstitch it's nothing fancy it's really just exactly like a normal backstitch i've gone back to i'm just going to go back one more on each side making sure that the stitches stack and you might have to wiggle a little bit but it's pretty easy to get through and then we're just going to clip these like we normally do fairly short a on a joint like this i like to do them on either side so they're kind of uh they're even and they balance out um on wallets and stuff like when you can hide it i'll usually do it on a single side but then we'll just do a little melt and there we go so now that we have this done we can remove our tape from the inside and we have our finished butt joint now what i like to do with these this is called a cobbler's anvil and what it's great because you can slide forms like this over it and then i'm gonna take my quarter pounder or you can use a crate hammer or whatever stitching hammer that you have and i'm just gonna tap this seam lightly and then i'm gonna just use my canvas and you can see that once you do that you get a super super tight seamless looking i mean you can still see a little seam but it's very tidy because we burnish that everything is nice and crisp and if you look at the inside you have no stitching at all so the next step and our last step is to stitch our bottom onto our pencil cup and we'll have a finished piece okay so with the glue dry your holes it's important to note they're not going to line up perfectly because there's a lot more holes on the outside than there has on the inside because the stitch line is shorter on the inside because it's a smaller circle but that's okay we show you how to stitch holes i'll show you how to skip holes so what i like to do is i like to get this pretty much lined up right where i want it and then i flip it over and i use my workbench to sort of stick that in and push it down so that we get a perfect right angle and you are going to have to kind of push it a little bit that's why i don't like to use a lot of glue because you don't want it to stick immediately there we go so once i have it close what i do and i don't know if this is right it's just the way that i've always done it is i get it and i just kind of tap it on the workbench and that usually gets me even all the way around and then i'll go around and i'll press the inside the seam a bit just to get that glue sticking and you will have like a little bit there you know use your workbench and now we're ready to sew so what i'm going to do is i'm going to pick a point where it looks like the stitches are pretty much lined up and i'm going to start from there first so i have a stitch here and a stitch here that are basically perfectly lined up so i'm going to start with that one and i'm going to stick i like to go from the top where i've done my angled stitch holes and then kind of press down and go through then i'm going to get my second one started and there's our first stitch so we're going to want to make sure that we're pulling these tight as we go along that's going to be very important so we'll just pull tight like that and then we go to the next hole so we've stitched a few stitches here and you can see it's going well but you can see as we get going we have a stitch hole here with no stitch hole here so we need to skip that stitch the way you do that is we're going to take our thread and we're going to go through the new hole on one side we're gonna go through and this can be a little bit tricky we're going to go through the existing hole on the other side so now we have two stitches coming through the same hole we're going to take our other thread and we're going to go out and into that new hole like that you don't want to pull too tight on these and then that lines us back up for our next hole where you can see we go right in and right through and we're a little bit behind but that's okay because we're gonna catch up and have to do that probably every you know six or seven stitches and then we're gonna pull that nice and tight and just keep going along on our way and so the same with these as on the butt stitch i'm just gonna back stitch two or three only this time i'm going to end my stitch on the bottom because of course it'll be sitting on a table so you won't ever be able to see it and here we go so this is sort of a simple application of these stitches but we have our nice right angle bottom um a nice cup that stands up straight and you can see on the inside well hopefully you can see the inside no stitching um because of that butt joint and a nice right angle that's going to stay that way and final test nice little pen cut so thank you guys so much for watching um i'm excited to see you guys give this a try if you haven't tried it already super fun just remember you're using you want a diamond all you don't want a scratch all for this project um thank you guys so much for watching and we'll see in the next one you

Channel: Corter Leather

Views: 138,783

Rating: 4.941752 out of 5

Keywords: TWO New Stitches to Elevate your Leathercraft!, corter leather, corter, leather box joint, leather butt joint, leather box joint tutorial, leather sewing, leather sewing awl, leather stitching, leather stitching techniques by hand, leather stitching techniques, leather saddle stitch instructions

Id: Gv-hlZ4q1Vo

Length: 23min 11sec (1391 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021