One of the biggest problems I have encountered making leather pouches is that I'm a peasant and cannot afford the genuine article that's required for the classical moulded designs. Plus my tooling is limited and I have the hand skills of a blind chimp who's drunk a bottle of Jack Daniels, so short of winning the lottery gearing up just to attempt some practice pieces is unlikely to ever happen soon. Instead I have to work with what I can find and that typically always means upholstery leather of one form another and that stuff is nearly always really thin, soft & floppy making large or rigid pouches impractical... then I had an idea.
Mooching through the local £shop discovered some woven cotton dustsheets and having a handy supply of free bin bags wondered if the two could be laminated together with a domestic hot iron into something stronger, yet still flexible. Turns out it they can and when you get to around six to eight alternating layers the resulting composite feels & behaves like a wood veneer or Birch Bark. Less layers and you are in the realm of being like a tough plastic carrier bag, slightly stretchy where thorns could poke a hole kind of thing.
Now the fun begins as we all know hot plastic will stick to just about everything so ironed a piece of the test composite onto a scrap piece of upholstery leather.
Scale is difficult to judge from the photo so got out the digital caliper: white/cream leather is 1mm thick and the blue plastic about half that at 0.5mm
Whilst still warm folded in two ninety degree bends and left to cool and there it sits nicely rigid holding its shape
So now in theory once I carve a block form and get some little G-clamps I should be able to make pouches like these (below) found on etsy using the faux leather I have lurking under the bench.(sods law it wont be that easy but I figure it's a step closer if nothing else)
Mooching through the local £shop discovered some woven cotton dustsheets and having a handy supply of free bin bags wondered if the two could be laminated together with a domestic hot iron into something stronger, yet still flexible. Turns out it they can and when you get to around six to eight alternating layers the resulting composite feels & behaves like a wood veneer or Birch Bark. Less layers and you are in the realm of being like a tough plastic carrier bag, slightly stretchy where thorns could poke a hole kind of thing.
Now the fun begins as we all know hot plastic will stick to just about everything so ironed a piece of the test composite onto a scrap piece of upholstery leather.
Scale is difficult to judge from the photo so got out the digital caliper: white/cream leather is 1mm thick and the blue plastic about half that at 0.5mm
Whilst still warm folded in two ninety degree bends and left to cool and there it sits nicely rigid holding its shape
So now in theory once I carve a block form and get some little G-clamps I should be able to make pouches like these (below) found on etsy using the faux leather I have lurking under the bench.(sods law it wont be that easy but I figure it's a step closer if nothing else)
