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.
First thing we have to do to put a design on the wallet is
we need to get the design
that we're going to carve onto that piece of leather.
And the way we do that is we use tracing film.
Tracing film is just a clear mylar that we will put over the pattern,
and we have here the outline traced.
And we'll take a little bit of tape here, and we'll secure that
so that it doesn't move around on us.
And we'll just trace all of those lines onto this using a pencil.
For the straight lines, we want to use something like a ruler
of some sort to make sure we get nice straight lines.
This will help us line it up onto the leather,
and it will help us see where the borders and all of that will go.
Once we have the border on, then the next thing is to get
all of these lines traced onto this film.
And just follow along as carefully as you can.
And this is one of the first places that you'll want to use some extra care.
Having a nice cleanly traced design helps to make the pattern
as close to this when we put it on the leather as possible,
so just take your time with this.
Make sure you get each and every one of these lines
traced onto the film.
When you think you're all done tracing these on,
one of the things you'll want to do is-- before you take
your tracing film totally away-- you'll want to pick it up like this
so that you can see if you missed any of these or not.
It can be kind of tough to line them back up again,
so make sure you get all of the lines traced.
It looks like we have all of the lines traced.
We'll, again, double-check, make sure that nothing's missing here.
And it looks like we have them all so let's pull this off of here
and let's get our leather ready to go.
The leather that we're going to use
is a piece of 4-5 ounce vegetable tan leather,
and I've got this piece of leather already glued down
to a piece of matboard.
The reason for gluing it to the matboard is that,
number one, it will keep the leather
from stretching out of shape as I work on it,
but I've also found
that on these lighter weight grades of leather,
like a 4-5 ounce and lighter,
you can get more depth in your carving
when you have it laminated down to a piece of cardboard.
And of course, we're working on a hunk of marble here,
that's always very important as well.
Got this glued down, cut to shape and everything in
so let's get it cased.
This wetting-down process in the business is called casing the leather.
And when I initially wet a piece of leather--
and I'm just using water and a sponge here.
We wet it down pretty good,
I like to make sure that the moisture is penetrated down
form the grain side of the leather
about halfway through this piece of leather.
So it looks like I'm really soaking it here,
but this is the initial wetting.
I'll never probably wet this this much again
in the course of carving this piece of leather.
But this first step,
it's real important that we get a good amount of moisture in it.
Then we're going to let that set just a little bit.
Now that our leather has dried out a little bit,
let's get the design traced on there.
I'm going to put a little bit of tape on the backside here
just so that nothing moves once I start this tracing process.
I'll just stick it down to my bench.
Okay, now that we've got that stuck down,
let's get our pattern lined up on there.
And this is where those straight lines will help you get this centered.
And then again, using some tape, we'll tack it down
so that nothing moves while we're tracing it on.
We're going to do the tracing with a stylus.
A stylus has a ball on one end,
and this one here I guess is just a little bit sharper,
but it's one of the modeling tools
and it works really good for pressing the design on.
And all we're going to do is
we're going to go back over this design and retrace these lines.
This time though, by putting a little bit of pressure
on the leather as we use this tool,
we actually imprint that outline into the leather.
And this is how we get that basic pattern onto our leather
so that we can cut it in and stamp it in
And, again, be very deliberate, very careful as you're tracing this on.
Make sure you follow those lines as closely as you can
so you have a nice clean pattern to begin with.
As we get toward the end of tracing this, before we peel everything loose again,
we'll want to check, make sure we've not missed anything.
So we'll leave it kind of stuck down on one side there
and pull this up and...
Whoops, you can see I missed several things.
I missed the border, and I'll explain that in a second,
but I also missed some petals on this flower
so I better lay this back down
and make sure I get all those flower petals on here.
Let's double-check again here
just to make sure we've not missed anything else.
One thing you'll notice that I did not do
is that I didn't put any of the border lines on there.
And the reason for that is that I want to put those on nice and straight,
and I can't trace straight lines for nothing.
So I'm going to use a pair of wing dividers to do that.
One of the other things too,
one of the reasons I use a ballpoint stylus--
I've heard of folks that use
a ballpoint pen, or a pencil, or something like that
to trace these lines on.
But what happens if you should happen to go through this tracing film with a pen?
It's bad news for your leather
because that doesn't come out of the leather
so using the right tools is really important.
One of the other things I'd have you notice
is that this little half circle here in the center of this flower
is where the seeds are going to go in that flower.
You'll notice that I didn't trace that as a solid line,
I traced that as a dotted line.
And, again, I'll explain what that's about in a minute.
But let's get this wing divider,
and let's put the rest of that border line on there.
Wing dividers work really good
for doing a border around anything like a belt or whatever.
So I'll just set this so that it comes out about right.
We'll check it all the way around though before we start doing it.
Looks pretty good.
Once we have that set, we'll just pull it along there
and get a nice straight line that follows the contour of this piece.
Next step will be to cut it in.
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.