Why Didn't I Do This Sooner? Making This Bag Changed Everything

hey friends my name is tanner and this video i want to talk to you about something i did recently for the very first time i had an absolute blast and it totally changed the way i look at leathercraft [Music] so until now i've not really given myself the permission to use other people's patterns to make things i've always made my own patterns and used my own original designs i think that's a really good thing to do a good skill to build but recently i made a pattern available to you it's that leather rucksack pattern i've seen so many of you just dozens and dozens build that bag and every bag is unique and different and i've heard from so many of you saying how fun and rewarding it is and how it's built your confidence and helped you learn new things so i thought man i have a lot to learn in leathercraft i better go get somebody else's pattern and build through it just see how much fun it can be so i love stock and barrels patterns the bags are awesome so i hopped over the website got the number 88 satchel and so i downloaded the pattern i bought some leather and i got busy in this video we're going to go through the entire process of building this bag and along the way i want to stop and talk about a few things that i love about this pattern a few things i changed and why and most importantly how making this bag has actually changed the way i look at leathercraft let's do it so after i downloaded the pattern i ran down to the local print shop and i found that they offer pretty good prices on these great big patterns so it cost like eight or nine dollars to get this pattern printed [Music] so then i ran down to the dollar store got some poster board and some spray glue and sprayed it all together and cut it out so i gathered up some hardware this was from buckle guy lots of it was the same that parker had recommended on the pattern itself a couple things i swapped out for things i had around the leather i used on this bag is wicked and craig traditional harness leather this is medium brown and five to six ounce uh parker had recommended to use a six to seven ounce leather but this is all i had around i think it worked really well there's a couple spots where i reinforced it because i didn't want it to be too floppy or thin but overall i think it worked great and i bought some one inch strips of thicker leather for the straps i think it's about 10 or 12 ounce from buckle guy and that worked well too same kind of leather this was the first project where i got to use this beautiful knife that will stelter made for me worked awesome on these long cuts and also on some skiving later on in the project [Music] [Applause] on some of these tighter corners i like to use hole punches and punch out the corners that just makes it a little bit easier you don't have to worry about cutting those really intricate inner diameters with a small knife i like to use a water-based glue i used to use barge glue but it got really stinky and so i switched to a water-based glue called renia aquilam 315 and it seems to work really well so that's what i used on this project all the burnishing you see here is done with tocanol and a little bit of elbow grease i use a piece of nylon or canvas i did dye all the edges on this project with a dark brown dye from fibings [Music] like i mentioned there were a couple parts on this bag like on the front panel here i didn't want this to get too floppy so here i'm designing a reinforcement panel for the front so it's actually just two layers thick so that's something that's going to get a lot of wear and tear over time so i took a little bit of time and designed a new one here and so that's one modification to this pattern that i changed basically because i'm using a little bit thinner leather [Music] most of the project had gone pretty smoothly up to this point but unfortunately there was one little hiccup that uh made me almost cuss on camera dang it i just finished uh sewing this little patch on the back to cover up the tuck lock and i have a huge scratch running kind of parallel to my stitch line you can see that so i'm gonna see what i can do to work that scratch out because i don't have another piece of leather that's this big so see if we can uh [Music] next to this screw there's just a little burr that little tiny burr on the metal and that was causing it so i better file that down before it scratches up some other other piece here thankfully it wasn't anything that a little bit of smith's leather bomb couldn't work out pretty tough to see that there's anything wrong there you gotta look pretty hard i think it worked out okay one other modification i made to this little strap on the front was that i used five to six ounce leather for it but i doubled it up here and i kind of skyped it right here so it goes down to one layer right as it goes in here i do like to sand all the edges where there are more than one layer of leather coming together that just helps get that edge really nice and flush and it makes burnishing go a whole lot easier as i'm going i'm just having an absolute blast because what i'm realizing with the exception of a couple modifications is that this has been done before you know that's the cool thing about stepping into somebody else's pattern you've seen the finished product you're not guessing if you're gonna be wasting a bunch of leather or not because you know it's gonna turn out pretty well so so you get to just have the freedom to just build and kind of tweak some things here and there and just really work on your craftsmanship and just enjoy the process of making something i thought that was really fun [Music] you definitely want to make sure this adhesive is all the way dry so i use a heat gun just to sort of activate it and do the final little bit of drying and then i stick the pieces together just after i heat it up and that seems to make it stick really well [Music] so i'm sewing on a cobra class 4 sewing machine it's an industrial machine it's real heavy duty and for a bag like this it might be overpowered but i thought it was just about right i had a lot of fun on the machine definitely did everything i needed to do here [Music] so here i am kind of redesigning the interior pocket the way the slots in the pocket were designed it seemed a little bit narrow like maybe i couldn't quite fit a pencil in there so i laid a pen and a pencil in there things i might want to stick in there and then laid the leather on there just to see how wide i would need to make those slots so i made them a little bit wider accordingly i also lowered that opening down a little bit just so it'd be easier to grab the top of the pen or pencil i definitely need to oil the sewing machine so this little strap on the inside parker had added it on his video as kind of an afterthought it does a really nice job at keeping this together especially as it's closed up keeps a really nice shape to it [Music] as far as the location of where that strap attaches on the back though it's not on the pattern and so i had to sort of guess at that but um i actually just put it at the same height i just traced this all the way through to the back and it worked out pretty well [Music] [Music] i still use these old wing dividers i had in college they work pretty well for this [Music] so this bag is actually a surprise for a good friend of mine and so i want to personalize it by putting his name on it [Music] i want to talk real quick about this little piece this is the male piece for the tuck lock and this little piece of leather that comes around here i had to modify it because i found that if i made it according to the pattern maybe if you're using thicker leather that's going to work out well and the thicker leather might just take up the whole gap in the brass here but with the leather i used i found that with the five to six ounce leather if i just extended this and just made it a symmetrical little piece it went right perfectly in there and so just two layers of that inserted perfectly and that worked out real well one thing i found that works kind of well on the shoulder straps is on the bottom side where it rests on your shoulder put the flesh side down not the smooth side not the the hair side this is the flesh size a little bit rougher and i think when it's sitting on your shoulder it just tends to grab and not slip off your shoulder i don't know [Music] [Music] [Music] one of my favorite new additions to the shop is this cobra skyping machine and so i use that to skype all the edges where the seams come together and it worked beautifully on this project and i was super grateful to have it i think it made these gusset seams a lot easier all right so i threw away the pattern piece for the handle of this bag so i dug through the trash couldn't find it so i sort of made my own so i got the length of that strap figured out and then i skipped the tails where they joined so it would be a nice little lap joint inside the handle [Music] so [Music] and then for the wrap that goes around that i skived the edges so that it was nice and thin on the bottom where it folds around so [Music] sort of eyeballed the the length of this piece but it seemed to work out pretty well it's a little bit of trial and error to get it to come out just right so they butt up together [Music] so [Music] so parker mentions he likes to over build his bags and i can definitely see that in the pattern that's one of the things i love about this so in the high stress areas of this bag just like where the strap pulls on the side of the bag so we have the strap attaching to this this little piece and that's riveted to the piece beneath it it's stitched to the piece beneath it and then this big square piece is stitched to the whole entire gusset so that's kind of like triple redundant super strength and i feel really good about having that on a bag [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] one thing i like to do is to make some leather washers and i use a 5 8 inch hole punch first of all to cut out the outer diameter and then a 1 8 inch hole punch in the middle i like to use that on the back side of all my rivets and chicago screws for chicago screw i think you need to use a 3 16 punch for the through hole [Music] [Music] stitching this top panel on was pretty nerve-wracking got one of them on a little bit crooked but i think it's gonna be all right [Music] so one thing i really love to use in my projects are copper rivets or brass rivets in this case i used brass just to sort of match the rest of the hardware i love this bunch of tools from buckle guy i think they're some of the nicest that i've ever used i'll put a link down below and there's also a video i made about setting rivets so kind of start to finish how i like to do it so you can check out this video too i'll put a link up here so the chicago screws come in different lengths on the post i just selected the right one so that goes through all the leather without being too long or too short [Music] [Music] i like to use just some rough grit sandpaper like this this is a 120 grit i guess not too rough but just to rough up the edge prior to gluing so my battery died while i was gluing up this gusset to the front panel it wasn't too bad actually especially having skived those edges but i just used a bunch of these binder clips and clipped where i had glued and removed the clips as i sewed it's one thing that's pretty brilliant about this bag it's kind of one of those things like i wish i had thought of that is that this front seam is a turn seam the seam goes to the inside on the back the seam comes to the outside so that's kind of like a win-win because it makes this front part pretty easy to turn and then it makes this back part a little easier to access with a sewing machine or if you're stitching by hand you don't have this other gusset like poking out and getting in the way so i thought that was a really clever design i've seen it used on some old swiss military bags like swiss military satchels so it's it's an old design but parker has reinvigorated it i think it's awesome on a bag like this [Music] one thing i didn't mention yet is that the pattern is absolutely perfect in terms of the length of this gusset it just is the perfect length to go all the way around with no extra here so big props to parker on that it just makes for a real easy process there's no extra trimming of the top of the gusset when things don't quite line up so that was a super nice surprise [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] do [Music] so this is kind of a nitpicky thing but i did one more modification here i didn't really like how the tongue of the buckle went through the top hole here so i shortened this little leather piece on the tuck lock so that it sits a little bit lower i shortened it by about three quarters of an inch so the whole thing just sits a little bit lower so now it's in the second hole from the top [Music] punched out some little tiny holes for the screws to go through [Music] so [Music] the keeper for this strap i used some five to six ounce leather and i just again kind of eyeballed the length that i would need [Music] and then i hand stitched it with the same thread as i used on this with a little x bar stitch so on the top it looks like x's and on the bottom it just looks like a bar that goes across the back [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] well i had a ton of fun making this it was so fun just to sort of take the design portion of my brain and shut it off for a while and just get to sort of walk in the shoes of the person who made this pattern which is parker he did an awesome job some things i loved about it were that it got me out of my comfort zone and it caused me to try some new things like sewing a seam like this a gusset like this i'd never done it on my machine but i've always wanted to so grabbing this project just gave me an automatic like go ahead and give it a shot and it worked out great so i built confidence in that new skill and there's a few other things that i hadn't tried yet so i think it's super valuable if you've not built someone else's pattern i would challenge you to grab one whether it's a pattern from parker or maybe it's my rucksack pattern which you can download below grab one build through it even if it seems like the pre the project might be quite a challenge for you maybe something like you've never done i think that's the cool part about getting somebody else's pattern so grab a pattern build it and let me know how it goes thanks for watching i'll see you on the next one [Music]

Channel: Claridge Leather

Views: 69,541

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Id: I74e4Q8BJMI

Length: 23min 18sec (1398 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 17 2021