Hi, I'm Jim Linnell at 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.
The next tool that we're going to use is the pear shader.
And I'd like to show you a few things first
about how the pear shader should be used.
Some of the problems people have with pear shading
is that they'll whack it pretty good, and it puts a dent in the leather.
And a lot of times when they use it,
you can see where their pear shading began
and where it ended.
It's with an abrupt start and a finish.
Pear shading when you're doing a leaf like this,
should end up with a fairly good amount of pressure at the beginning of the--
at the end of the leaf,
and then as you move down the length of it,
it should fade out and disappear so that you never actually see
where the shading actually ended.
It should always fade out and disappear.
This is that feathering that we were talking about
with the swivel knife.
This here also has to feather out.
You see how you can get good depth at the end of it
and you get it to fade out and disappear.
So I want to show you the technique it takes to get that.
A lot of that depends on the grip.
When I hold the tools-- if you'll notice my grip on the tools,
I actually hold it very close to the business end of the tool down here.
This is the end that's doing all of the work.
Sometimes I'll see folks trying to hold on to their tool like this,
but they don't have the control they need to have over this end of it.
So I would encourage you to slide your fingers down
towards the business end of it.
And actually you need to hold it with a pretty tight grip
so that when you hit this tool, it actually will recoil.
If you watch somebody that's done a lot of leatherwork,
they look like they're just whacking this tool
and moving it along and it just kind of slides along.
But it's not really sliding.
What it's doing is bouncing along.
I'm going to exaggerate this.
I'm going to hold this so it's lightly off of the leather,
and then as I hit though with that tight grip,
you can see that it recoils.
It bounces back up.
And this how you get that rhythm of tapping and moving.
So when you watch someone who's got some experience using this tool,
it looks like they're sliding it along.
And they get all of these nice, even impressions,
and it all fades out and disappears.
They'll walk it side to side like this to get a nice smooth area.
But you never see all of the individual impressions.
Sometimes when a beginner starts,
it'll look like they took a ball-peen hammer to it.
And if you're doing that,
you're moving it too far between each impression,
and you're not overlapping them.
If you'll-- again, look how far this tool moves
each time I hit it, it's only moving a very little bit.
So I get a lot of overlap, and that's the secret
to getting this pear shading to come out nice and smooth.
And then learning to adjust the force of the mallet
so that you've faded out and it disappears.
If you can get that trick down,
this pear shading is going to go much, much smoother for you.
So let's get started on our project.
We have several large petals that we need to use.
I'm going to use the one that I was just showing you.
It's a pear shader with vertical lines on it.
And it works really good for these larger petals.
It's nice and broad,
and so, by walking it back and forth a little bit,
I can cover these broad petals real easily.
And if you look,
you'll see how that's turning a nice, rich color there.
It's got a lot of that burnish coming out.
That tells me that this leather is just right
for using these tools right now.
It's got just the amount of moisture needed
to give me that good burnish.
When I'm using it on these flower petals,
you'll notice that I'm kind of moving down both sides of it.
I'm staying closer to the edge of the petal
and leaving kind of a raised ridge out in the center of it.
That's how I wish to shade these in.
We'll see how that works out a little later.
But you'll notice if you listen,
you can hear that I can hit it pretty good at the end of the flower petal,
but as I move down toward the base of the petal,
down toward those seeds,
I lighten up with the force, and it fades out and disappears.
That way I get some three-dimension.
And that's really the thing
I would want you to think about as you're using this tool.
The idea here isn't to flatten out these flower petals with this tool;
the idea is to give them some three-dimension.
Make them look like they're kind of cup-shaped.
In this case here, it looks like they have
kind of a raised ridge now after I used this,
running down the center of them.
And that's the idea.
We're sculpturing the leather with this tool.
We're not just mashing it all down.
(tapping)
And the technique is real important.
If you're using this tool and you're getting that lumpy looking--
if it looks like you took a ball-peen hammer to it,
you can go back over and smooth it up,
but try to get it to come out nice and smooth the first time over.
You'll end up with a lot smoother looking work.
(tapping)
See how that fades out?
You don't actually ever see where that pear shading--
where the last impression was.
It kind of just gradually fades out and disappears.
(tapping)
If you've already downloaded this pattern, you will also have a photo carve of it--
a picture of what this looks like all finished.
And you should refer to that often.
If you're not sure where this pear shader should be used,
you need to study that photo carve pattern,
because those darkened-in areas on the flower petals,
will show you where the pear shading needs to go.
It shows you how much needs to be done.
This same rich burnish is what you're looking for.
And the same thing with the beveling.
When we get to the beveling,
you'll see that one side of the lines are darker.
And that'll be the place that the beveling--
the side of the lines that the beveling is used on.
These pear shaders come in a lot of different sizes and shapes.
I've got another one here, that's a long skinny one.
It's got that same lined texture on it.
But these flower petals down here on this one,
are a little bit narrower then the other ones,
so I need something that's just a little bit tighter
to do that shading there.
So I'll use this long skinny one.
(tapping)
When doing a large petal like this here,
it's real important that you learn how to walk these tools to the side as well.
Obviously, it's gets lighter as you move down the length of it.
But also you need to learn to walk them side to side.
That's where all those techniques come in handy.
It makes this tool work for a lot of different size petals.
(tapping)
And then I'm going to use one with a different texture.
I have a checkered one here that's got a metal texture on it.
And I'm going to use that on the scroll to create sort of a concave area
around the inside of this curve.
We're going to actually do some pear shading on this.
And I'm going to start down here towards the base of the scroll,
and start really close to the line,
but not flattening out the line.
And as I move along, I'm just going to pear shade
this little channel into the inner curve of that scroll.
And let it come up here and kind of blend in
with the camouflage impressions.
(tapping)
And it looks like we've got all of our pear shading done.
So then the next step will be the beveling.
Thank you for joining me today.
Be sure to 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.