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'll you know
how to get the best results out of your leatherwork.
We're going to build an interior for our wallet,
and we're going to cut all of those pieces out now.
You'll find a copy of all of these parts online
you can print out a copy of that.
I've taken and traced those outlines onto some bag stiffener.
It's just a little bit of a stiff cardboard,
and I've written on the top of each one
how many of each piece I need to cut.
Some of these where it says cut two, one left, one right,
just trace it once and then I'll flip it over to cut a second one
so that I have a left and a right version of them.
And this makes these wallet interior parts reusable.
You can use these over and over again.
When I get done with these I'll punch a hole in each one of these
and put a key post through it or something like that
so that I can keep them all together and next time I need to make a wallet,
here we go, I've got these parts all cut out, ready to reuse,
and you can get a lot of use out of these templates like this.
So it's a good idea on the popular projects
that you're working on to maybe make some templates
of the parts that you're going to want to cut often.
We're going to cut this wallet interior out of some 2/3 ounce veg tan cowhide.
It's just natural leather,
just like what we were tooling our wallet back on
except that it's a lot thinner,
which will keep us from having a lot of bulk in the project
when you fold a wallet up.
And so when you get ready to lay these out,
if you have all of your parts,
you can lay that on your piece of leather
to make sure you get maximum usage out of your piece of leather.
If you want to lay them out like that--
it helps you to get the most out of you leather.
Then, what I'll do, is I'll take just a common pencil,
and I'll go ahead
and just draw around the outline of this piece here;
and that becomes my...
that's how I get my pattern on that piece of leather
I have it drawn on there, and we'll just--
got that one traced, we'll do this other one.
This here is the pockets
that go in our project.
Here is another part of--
the pockets, so just trace around it with the pencil.
We're going to cut right on that pencil line when we cut this out,
so that's going to for the most part disappear.
This piece right here
actually has a slot in it
that we need to make sure we mark as well.
You see these lines here, I've punched a hole in either end of this
so we want to make sure that we trace the slots
on the project as well.
There we go; we've got those two parts cut out.
Let me show you the cutting out steps here then--
I'm just going to use a razor knife.
These come in a lot of different ways.
This is one that's available from Tandy Leather.
You can keep a sharp blade in,
because when this one gets dull you can just put a new one in there.
So that's what I like to use.
And I'm working on a cutting surface,
this is just a high density plastic.
Again it's like a cutting board, it's something, again,
it's available from Tandy Leather, but works real good.
It protects the blade as you are cutting.
You can cut right through it. It doesn't drag.
Sometimes if you are working on wood or on hard rubber,
when you're cutting out your piece of leather
that will...
your blade will stick in that material,
and it makes it hard for you to cut all the way through,
but if you have a big sharp knife,
this 2/3 ounce leather cuts fairly simply.
You just, again, follow in those lines
in cutting it in.
Sometimes you might find it easier to trim this piece out
so that you're not having to work with a whole side of leather
that will just get that big piece out of our way
and just trim this out.
Makes it a little easier to work with it on your board.
There are a lot of tools that are made for cutting leather.
You could probably use a good pair of sheers.
You could use one of the tools that--
Historically, what has been used for doing this kind of cutting
is a head knife.
But most folks don't do enough leather work to be able to justify
having a tool like that just for cutting it out.
But everybody probably has a knife like this laying around,
so it's just-- and it works just fine for doing this.
I find it convenient and easy to get a hold of.
Again it's real easy to keep a sharp blade in
and you don't spend a lot of time honing it.
And then we need to cut these two slots in here.
One of the things that works real good
is if you'll take a round hole punch,
just the smallest one you have
and punch a hole at each end of these slits.
(tapping)
Makes it easier when we connect these piece together,
then we use the knife and connect those.
But it won't take you very long to cut these pieces out,
and we'll be ready to start shaping them here in a second.
We have all of our pieces cut out of the 2/3 ounce leather,
and I've already started forming some of them.
You notice that we got to fold some and put some creases on them.
So let me show you on a couple of these here how we do that.
For example, on this pocket here,
we have a crease that we run around the outside edge of it,
so since this is veg tan leather,
we'll just take it and moisten it a little bit
with the sponge and some water,
and as that starts to dry just a little bit,
I'm going to use a tool here called an adjustable creaser.
It is adjustable by screwing this down;
you can make a wider crease, narrower crease,
whatever fits your project.
And all this does is just put an attractive crease
along the edge of your project
and on your dampened leather
it doesn't take a lot of pressure to do this.
Just going to move it along,
laying one edge over the edge of your leather,
and then by pushing it along we get this nice little crease
that gives it kind of a finished look.
I think that if you look at a lot of finished leather good,
you'll see that a lot of times, these raw edges--
they'll run some kind of a crease;
just a decorative border is all it is.
And this tool works really good for doing that.
And then, once you get that on there,
you come back and work it a little bit to give it a little more prominence.
This is how those creases are put on there.
See that? And then we'll do the same thing on this other piece.
We also have to fold this piece.
This is the rest of the pocket.
There's actually two pockets on each side of this project
and this edge right here is the leading edge on that pocket
that goes underneath that,
so we'll dampened this down--
we're actually going to dampen this whole piece of leather down
because we also have to fold it and shape it,
so that it's ready to go in and be the pocket that it needs to be.
So we'll first it down with a little bit of moisture,
and I'm not soaking it all the way through,
you can see that it's just getting damp on the top edge
and the part that's going to show is actually this edge right here.
If you look at this other side that I've already done.
When these get laid together, we have a nice double pocket like this
with that crease running along both edges there.
So to do this on this side, we'll run-- well, starting about here.
We'll run along this edge
and over to the bottom of this side of it.
Then we'll get this little crease along the edge.
And then, this piece needs to be folded as well
and basically, the fold line goes right in the middle here,
in fact, if you fold this piece in half,
these two curved edges right here will pretty much line up,
and when they line up,
that will cause your fold to be almost in the middle here
so we'll--
Well, this is damp, just go ahead and form this piece.
You can use a tool like a creaser.
This is a buffalo bone folder that we have
and just with a little bit of pressure here
you can get a nice sharp crease here,
and then let this piece of leather dry, and it'll dry in that shape,
and then we'll be ready to dye it
and make the interior the color that we want it.
That's how we shape that piece
so when we get ready then to assemble this,
this pocket will get stuck over the top
and gives us a nice double pocket on the top,
and we'll have that on both sides.
It gives us four good usable pockets on our project.
This will give you a rough idea
what our wallet interior is going to look like.
Like I said, it'll have a couple of pockets on either side.
We have this center piece that holds that together,
and you'll see that I've got some grooves in it here
or it looks like grooves.
These are actually creases that I stuck in there
with this same adjustable creaser
and all I did was using a straight edge
and using really about the same spacing I just ran it up and back and forth
until I had a multiple group of these creases running up there.
And the reason for that is that will give us a little bit
like an accordion type of an interior,
allows us to fold, when we fold the wallet in half
that way we won't have it wrinkling there.
It'll disguise that.
I use the adjustable creaser for doing this rather than wing dividers
because the creaser actually has kind of a blunt edge here,
it actually puts a crease in the leather,
whereas the wing dividers have a sharp point on them,
and they would actually kind of scratch the leather,
and I don't really want to scar this, I just want to add these creases.
So that's the reason for this tool over the wing dividers.
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.