Hi, I'm Jim Linnell with Tandy Leather.
I'm going to be showing you how to make a wallet.
And I'll be going through each of the steps,
with each of the tools,
in enough detail so that you'll know how to get the best results
out of your leatherwork.
So the next thing that we need to do is peel this piece of cardboard.
We've left the cardboard on there through the dying and finishing process
just so that the leather would keep its shape and everything.
And as I peel the cardboard off,
you'll notice that I'm peeling the cardboard off of the leather
rather than the leather off of the cardboard.
And the reason for that,
is I don't want to grab the edge of this here
and start pulling on it and have that piece of leather
stretch or become contorted as a result of it.
This is typical of having a little bit of that cardboard stay on there.
This is why we put a liner on that piece of leather.
We're going to use a real thin piece of lining type leather.
You could use thin garment leather.
Just find something that's in a color and a tone
that blends well with your wallet.
But it's a good thing to put something over that,
whether you have cardboard sticking on there or not.
That gives you a nice smooth finish on the inside of your wallet.
Before we do that though,
we need to go ahead and mark where our stitching lines are going to go.
So, let's prepare to do that.
We'll be putting this wallet together pretty soon,
so at at this point we want to go ahead and mark
where the stitching lines are going to go.
Using a pair of wing dividers, we'll set them for roughly
about 1/8 of an inch.
When you have a wallet like this, with a border around it,
you probably want to have your stitch line go roughly half way in.
So, using the wing dividers, we're going to scribe a light line
along the edge of this.
And this is going to be the line that we use to punch
our stitching holes in here.
We'll get this put on at this point before we attach the insides.
So that we have a nice, flat surface here to work with.
And then it's time for us to start assembling this.
And we'll begin by putting a liner on it.
The liner that we're going to use for our wallet,
is just a piece of lightweight garment-type leather.
It's real thin, it's probably an ounce and a half
or something like that.
So it won't add any bulk to our wallet once we get it glued into place.
To glue this in place, we will take some rubber cement,
and we'll put a coat of that on both the backside of the liner
and the backside of our wallet, and then we'll stick them together.
Rubber cement works really well for tacking things down.
It's not a permanent bond so if we needed to shift things around,
it would let us do that.
But we'll just put a light coat of it here on the back side of our back.
And make sure you get it out to the edges.
Rubber cement and some of the contact cements
that we use in leatherwork, have a stronger odor
than some of the other products that we use,
so you might want to use this in a good, ventilated area.
It's always just a good precaution with things like that.
There's nothing offensive or harmful about the odor.
But it just keeps the air clean where you're working.
You might keep it well ventilated.
Got that, and now we'll put it on the liner as well.
With the rubber cement, it works best, if you put it on both surfaces
and then let it start to dry so it's just tacky.
And that's how it sticks best together.
It doesn't take a lot, it just takes a light coat.
But this holds everything in place.
And obviously, the rubber cement will flex and move,
so as the wallet folds and go in and out of the pocket,
this liner and everything will move with it.
You won't have any wrinkling or any of those kinds of problems--
one of the great things about using rubber cement.
I've cut a little scrap of this liner material
a little bit larger than the actual wallet back.
Once I get it glued on there, I'll then trim it so that everything
matches up all the way around.
That should be enough there.
So now, with this laying flat, we'll just stick that down like this.
And we have now, a nice liner like this on the inside
instead of that cardboard.
I'm going to use a pair of leather shears to trim this liner off--
the excess liner off of our project.
It works pretty good, it's just like cutting fabric or something.
Let's just do a nice, clean job there.
So there's our wallet.
It's got a nice liner on the inside of it.
And now it's ready for us to assemble our wallet interior
and get it ready to put in there.
It's time to put our wallet interior together.
We'll begin with these pieces.
These are the ones that we folded over.
They have the slot in the back.
And this piece actually is what connects them together.
And what we'll do is, we will pucker these,
we'll fold these,
we'll run this tab underneath this
and then we'll spread those wings open again there.
And that will hold that side in.
We'll do the same thing on the other side,
and fold those wings back down.
And that's how that gets held together.
And then these will fold over and get stitched down there and there.
So now we have the beginning of that.
On our wallet back, one of the things you want to do
or pay attention to at this point, is when you flip this over,
make sure you are putting your wallet interior
in the right direction.
By that I mean, if we had put someone's name on this wallet for example,
and had "Jim" running across here,
and we we weren't paying particular attention to what side was up,
when we were putting this interior in,
we could have "Jim" reading upside down when they open their wallet.
We want to make sure that we get it in there correctly.
So, when we start putting this together, we will begin by putting the divider in.
The divider gets centered along the bottom--
if this is our bottom.
It gets centered along the bottom and this tab down here gets stuck down.
When it comes to sticking all of this all together,
this works really good.
Sometimes if you use rubber cement for this,
the rubber cement, it's hard to keep it contained exactly in the right place.
But I love this double-stick tape. It works really good for this.
It helps us keeps the stickum and the tape exactly where we want it.
So what we'll do is, we'll peel off a little piece of it here.
And we'll stick it along this tab here that we want
right next to the edge.
Then, using some scissors here, we'll trim it off
so that it's just short of the end.
On both sides.
And then we'll peel off this extra-- the other side of the liner
so that what we have here now is just the tape.
Then, again, lining this up on our wallet,
we'll center it up,
make it line up on the bottom edge there.
Stick it down.
You've got a second chance or two if you need it to restick it.
But once you get it lined up where you want it,
and then put it down with a little bit of pressure,
that will stay put there.
That will stay there so when we're punching the holes
through the other side, all of the holes will be lined up.
We can punch through everything at once.
Next we have a tab that goes over the top.
This kind of hides that double pocket on the inside.
So we'll get that stuck in place and do the same thing with that.
And then line that up along this top edge.
We're ready to stick our interior in.
This one here, actually floats freely here.
The only place it gets stuck down is where these tabs are.
So turn it over and we'll stick some of this double-stick tape
on the back of those places.
I'll take a little piece here.
This stuff is so much cleaner than using cement.
And it holds everything nicely in place long enough for us to do our punching.
And we should put a little piece up here on these other corners too.
These little tabs here need to be stuck down as well.
We'll stick that into our wallet.
Here we want to again, center it up, we want this edge over here,
lining up this edge on this edge.
And then the bottom, we want it lined up on that bottom edge as well.
And we'll push that down and get that to stick.
Then the last piece, we need to put in place
are these two pockets.
They'll go in here like this.
So we'll put a piece along the two edges that need to be laced.
And we'll stick those down.
Then, we have our wallet interior in place,
we're ready to start punching holes.
Thank you for joining me today.
Be sure and check back often here at our blog
and we'll show you more tips and ideas
on how to get the most fun out of your leatherwork.