Ogham and some tooling
- Thread starter Dreadhead
- Start date
The other great use for clingfilm (thanks to Eric Methven for this one) is when tracing your pattern onto the leather. Initially, I got myself a pad of decent tracing paper, traced in pencil and then went over it with the stylus to mark the design on the leather. Tracing paper is fairly water resistant, so this works pretty well. But...
...if you cover the leather in clingfilm, you can lay a piece of paper over it and it won't go soggy. So it means that you can, for example, print a design off the computer and trace it directly onto the leather, without the intermediate step of copying it to tracing paper. Great for people like me who can copy but aren't too good at sketching original designs.
Geoff
ooo another great tip cheers! i usually pull up the designs on my laptop, lay the screen flat and trace off the screen. then tracing over the leather and use a pen to trace the design into the leather. will mostly likely try that clingfilm tip would save me having to trace stuff. although i dont have a printer so wont be able to use it that much
And another method from Stohlman - useful if you're doing a repeated design - is to make your own stamp out of leather. Not something I've tried yet, and only really useful for marking cased leather in preparation for carving, rather than for deep stamping.
Trace the design onto a piece of cased leather (in reverse!), use the swivel knife to make deep cuts, dry the leather rapidly to harden it and open the cuts (e.g. in a warm oven with the door part open), then apply lacquer onto the leather to further harden it.
This can then be laid on the cased leather work piece and tapped gently with a soft mallet to make an imprint for you to use as the basis of your carving, to leave slightly raised lines on the work piece.
I suppose you could do the opposite, and background around the lines on your pattern to leave the design as raised lines on the template, which would then make small indendations when it is used.
Geoff
Trace the design onto a piece of cased leather (in reverse!), use the swivel knife to make deep cuts, dry the leather rapidly to harden it and open the cuts (e.g. in a warm oven with the door part open), then apply lacquer onto the leather to further harden it.
This can then be laid on the cased leather work piece and tapped gently with a soft mallet to make an imprint for you to use as the basis of your carving, to leave slightly raised lines on the work piece.
I suppose you could do the opposite, and background around the lines on your pattern to leave the design as raised lines on the template, which would then make small indendations when it is used.
Geoff
that's a neat idea never thought of hardening leather into a stamp before. that is a lot of work though! im going to start playing around with some of these tips, after all i still consider myself a beginner!
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