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 leather work.
The next step in bringing our design to life
is to do the beveling.
Beveling is where we press down the leather on one side of the line
and make the design stand out.
So this is really one of the most important steps
in carving a design, at least in stamping it.
And bevelers-- they come in a lot of different sizes
from large to small.
And you really need to have something that goes
from small to medium, even up to large like that.
That's a good range of bevelers to have available.
I like to use the ones with the checkered texture on them.
They tend to come out a little bit smoother.
But I'm going to show you some tricks that will help you get your beveling
to come out nice and smooth.
A beveler tool when you look at it from the side,
you can see that it is a bevel-shaped tool
that has one corner here that is longer than the others.
And that's the side that actually does all of the work.
When you're using the tool,
you'll always have that facing towards you.
So if I was going to bevel this line,
I would turn this so that the tool that I'm using
is actually sitting in the cut,
and I'm looking right at the face of the tool.
I'm going to turn this so you can see what I'm doing.
But being able to see what the face of this tool is doing
is how you make sure you get good, clean beveling.
And what we do is by tapping this tool
and moving it along,
we press down the leather on one side of the cut,
and it looks like that is raised up by pressing this down.
If you've got good moisture content in your leather,
if you've got it cased just right,
you're going to get this really dark burnish.
As I mentioned earlier,
that's what you want to look for on your photo card patterns.
That dark burnish that's going to indicate
which side of the line you should be beveling.
And that's one of the challenges for somebody first getting started;
is figuring out which side of the line do I bevel?
So the technique of using this tool is real similar to using the pear shader
in that you want to, again,
have the grips so that you're gripping it down close to the working end,
you want to have a tight grip.
You want to hold it so that you get that same jack hammer kind of action.
You want to get that tool
to kind of bounce along as you're moving it;
that way, you end up with a lot of overlap.
And again, if you look at how far I move this tool each time I hit it,
it's only moving maybe a third or a fourth of the width of the tool.
The majority of the impressions are overlapping,
but that's how you're able to do a nice smooth bevel job.
Let me show you how it worked out when I was starting to get to bevel.
When I first started my beveling,
I went along, and I tried to slide it and move it,
and it looked like someone got their teeth into my leather.
You could see every mark that I made.
And there's several things that cause that.
Number one is moving it too far.
When you're beveling,
you want to only move it just a little bit each time.
And so that's where you want to learn this jack hammer thing;
it makes it easy so that it's ready to move along.
Sometimes people will hold this tool and they're afraid it's going--
they'll have a death grip on it.
They think it's going to get away from them.
So when they hit it, they're pushing down,
and this now is sitting in a hole in the leather.
And so it doesn't want to slide.
So the grip in having it just lightly touching the leather,
allows it to bounce along.
And look at that.
You actually can go back and clean this up.
If you make a mess the first time over, you can go back over it and smooth it up.
One of the other things that will cause these bumps in between each impression
is angling the tool.
If you have this tool angled, trying to push it along,
scoot it along like that,
you have the side of the tool making an impression.
If you end up with this jagged look again,
it's probably-- look at your technique
make sure that you're holding it straight up and down.
When you're using the tool
you can lean it towards you just a little bit.
You don't want to lean it back.
If you lean it too far back, then you have the heel of the tool
leaving a line on the back side of the row of impressions,
and you don't want that either.
You want these impressions to just kind of fade out and disappear.
So holding the tool for the most part straight up and down,
letting it kind of bounce all along like that.
And one of the other important things about the beveler,
is to make sure you get it beveled deep enough.
This is where you actually get the three-dimension in your design.
So when you're beveling, you want to bevel as deeply as you cut.
So if you've cut this leather, say 1/3 of the thickness of the leather,
and you bevel to the bottom of the cut,
you're going to have this design standing out
one third the thickness of your leather.
As we start working on our design here,
the first place I want to bevel-- I want to bevel this border.
One of the general rule of beveling is you want to bevel the items
that are closest to you.
So since we have sort of a frame around this,
I want to make that frame stand out first.
So we first start by beveling around on the inside of this border.
That kind of makes it look all like it's sitting inside of a frame.
(tapping)
And I'm getting some good depth.
And here I went to a wider tool.
That's what these larger tools gets used for,
is these long, straight lines like this.
But the technique again, is still the same.
You see I'm kind of just letting it bounce along.
Getting lots of overlap of those impressions.
And again, if you've got good moisture content in there,
you're going to be getting this rich burnish in your leather
as you would use it.
Now we start making it stand out.
As we start beveling the inner part of the design
you want to use a beveler that is as large as you can use
that does the job.
And I guess what I mean by that is, if you use a real small one,
it's going to be real tedious to get all of this beveled.
(tapping)
But you also have to have one
that is small enough to accomplish the job.
Don't try to make a large tool fit into a place that it is too large to fit.
And again, following that rule
of working on the foremost part of the design,
the part of it that's closest to you,
on this flower that we have here in the corner,
we have lots of petals, they overlap each other
so one has to look like it's laying on top of the other,
But we have three here in front
that are kind of sticking out straight toward us.
So we're going to start with those,
because those are the ones that are kind of in front.
They're the seeds, and all of that is in behind that.
One of the things you see me doing a lot is moving my leather.
And the reason I'm moving my leather around so much
is I want to make sure that I can see what the tool is doing.
When you're working on a project like this,
you have to be able to see what your tool is doing
and so if the angle isn't right,
get it turned so you can see what's going on.
Half of the problems that people have with beveling
is trying to guess where it goes.
Make sure that you're on the right side.
Make sure that you're using tools that will do the job as well.
As we were cutting the flower petals,
you'll remember that we feathered out the cuts,
remember that they started out fairly deep out
at the end of the flower petal.
And then as they came down towards the center of the flower,
towards those seeds, they got lighter, lighter, lighter,
faded out and disappeared.
Well, that's how you want to bevel as well.
Your beveling will start out-- it's deepest on these flowers
will be out towards the end of the flower petals.
But as you move towards the center of it,
they will lighten up and gradually fade out and disappear.
Every line that you initially cut into your leather,
you cut the design in,
it will have to be a beveled against on one side or the other.
So you have a lot of beveling to do.
This will take a little more time than some of the other steps.
And if you have to re-moisten the leather in the middle of this, do it.
And then let it dry back to where it's at that just right state
before you actually start the beveling so you get the best results with it.
(tapping)
As we get towards the end of our beveling,
we need to again, make sure we haven't missed anything.
There's still time to go back and clean up.
If some of it hasn't come out as smoothly as you would like it
or you're not happy with the depth that you've gotten,
you can go back and fix it that at this time,
just to make sure that you have
as much three-dimension coming out of this as you can.
(tapping)
This is a good time to go back and double-check
and make sure that you have gotten everything that you need to.
If your feathering out didn't feather out as much as you wanted,
you can come back and smooth that up,
but this is a good time to do that double-check.
So if you're happy with it, the next steps that we will use
are the ones that add some of the texture,
the veiners, the seeders, and those things.
So, that is what will come next.
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 leather work.