Saturday, March 16, 2024

WELCOME!!

 

Welcome to my Blog

About Leatherwork

I hope it will inspire you.

I hope you can learn about new things with me.

-- JOHAN


Rope

I cannot remember where I saw this first.  It was long ago, but it has become one of my signature decorations on projects.

This is how I achieve a very effective border: 

 Mark two parallel lines with a compass.   
Cut them with a swivel knife.  
Now use a lined sharp-tip beveler [F910] along one of the lines to make one row of indents and then turn the leather around to make the row of indents along the other cut line.  
The smooth and checkered bevelers, with the same shape, does not have the same good effect, but try them by all means, you might like their effect more.


My friend Dawson recently came up with this clever variation:
  • In the bottom row, A is first beveled on the inside of two cut lines - sections B and C is not beveled at all.
  • In the top row, the inside of the cut lines were first beveled for all the sections.
  • Sections A and B were done with the basic V407 veiner; C and D with a larger one and E with a smaller veiner.

Another friend, Jeanne, came up with a very striking variation:   simply a different spacing:

Jeanne did this:


I hope this can inspire you!

[First published Oct 31 2007
Updated March 2024]

Thursday, January 18, 2024

Antique Paste

 Using Fiebing's antique paste and ProResist

These examples and videos were made with the antique paste and ProResist made by Fiebings.

In my experience these two products should always be paired - they do not work well with other resists or antique stains.


Here are two videos that show the process:

















Tuesday, August 22, 2023

3D CONSTRUCTION

 This blog post will be completed as more videos are created.   So this is really still a draft version.

I am also still testing the best way to get my TikTok videos here on my blog....




Thursday, June 15, 2023

Stamping Suggestions

STAMPING SUGGESTIONS 

Our local leather guild recently came up with some stamping suggestions.  Here are the results - I hope it inspires you!




Not all stamping, but a friend came up with some swivel knife suggestions as well:




The following two pics show examples done only with the stamps that are identified by their numbers (it is one piece of leather, so there is overlap.)



Another blog post about this can be seen at

Basic Stamping Tools


Monday, May 1, 2023

Basic Stamping Tools

To start with tooling on your project,  you need very few tools. 
I picked here the basic tools in most starter sets,  and added two that I think are really nice to have : F910 and a basketweave.
Just sitting down with those eight tools, I came up with these examples of what you can do with them (this excludes carving that first requires swivel knife cuts).
These are then what most people refer to as geometric stamping. 


Friday, April 28, 2023

Writing on Leather

 WRITING IDEAS

It would be a plus to your leatherwork, to learn to write in a calligraphy style.  I learnt to do "Italic" - you write it with a wide pen nib (or a wide woodburning tip):


I will show you many examples, but first let us get a No-No out of the way:
When using a very fancy alphabet stamp set, do NOT stamp the whole name/word in uppercase. It looks very wrong. 
This is an examle of writing that would have been unreadable if it was done in upper case only:

The more everyday letter stamp sets that are still sold today, can be used as is (they usually do not even have lower case letters included):

Many crafters have problems in lining the letters up.
If your project (and personality) allows, you can purposefully have the letters not in  straight line, as in this example:

Sometimes the writing makes up a big part of the overall design.  That would make it worth spending some extra time on the writing to make it pop:

Here is an example of freehand writing done with a swivel knife:

Of course, it is also a lot of fun to do the writing is such a way that it compliments other elements of the project:
This was written with an A105 background stamp, the same a the border.

...and this one was done in a woodwork design:

The writing on the left was done with a very thin tip Sharpie, and the Italic lettering on the right was done with a permenent ink Calligraphy pen:
When you use permanent ink pens to write on leather, make sure to test first how the writing will hold up to the sealer/conditioner you intend to put over it.
For example, a waterbased sealer like NeatLac will fade out a waterbased ink.














I hope these examples will inspire you to try different ways to write on leather where the design calls for it!

I will continue to place examples here as I work through my photos..... if this helps you, you can come back and look at the updates!