Wait what?

So yeah, I added leatherworking to my arsenal of crafting. It had a reason – I decided to make Moiraine’s formal outfit – leather bolero included – for the JordanCon costume contest. But rather than start with the competition entry as my first piece, I needed something to practice with first.

I basically watched Youtube videos and demos until I got bored – aka I felt like I knew what the next steps were going to be.

My recommendations:

• Weaver Leather has amazing intro videos broken down into very basic topics
• Dieselpunk has detailed videos demo-ing how he makes his patterns step by step.

So I bought this Dieselpunk hip pouch pattern, proceeded to spend way too much on supplies (this is not a cheap hobby), and got started.

My very first punch into any leather!

Here I was punching just on a cutting board on my costco craft table, and sometimes it would take a couple hits to get everything to go through. For my next project, I spent the money on the Tandy poundo board and quartz slab to put under what I was punching, and moved the setup to my heavy wooden dining table, and that helped a lot.

All the pieces cut and punched:

This took forever because I could only work on it during the day, because I wasn’t about to risk waking up children while pounding punches with a hammer.

Then I dyed all the pieces. I didn’t actually use the right product for this; I had something called “leather antiquing gel” in my dragon-like-hoard of a craft-stash and figured that would work as leather dye. It did work, but it’s not really meant for a full dye job which is why it looks pretty streaky. We’re just gonna call that a feature to make it look “rustic” and buy the correct dye next time.

My favorite step – sewing the pieces together (I think it’s pretty obvious by now that I enjoy hand sewing. And this is handsewing on easy mode since all the holes are there for you alread).

I was all set to have this done SEVERAL DAYS before a GBACG event, when I realized I had screwed up a couple things:

• the straps I cut to go around my waist and hips were orders of magnitude too big. The pattern just said “cut to measurements” but didn’t specify subtracting the length of the buckle pieces attached to the bag.
• I had fully missed cutting out a small strap piece. So had to get that cut/punched/dyed/edges burnished/waxed and rivet it on.

My last minute setup – pounding rivets in the master bathoom with a baby monitor because that’s the most soundproof room relative to my sleeping children:

Sliced off the end of the belt and using it as a template for the holes in the now-shorter belt:

And the finished pouch!

Just in time for the GBACG Witcher event! I threw together a vaguely fantasy woods ranger outfit, since the event included a sword fighting class.

The only me-made part of this is the pouch, the fake leather leggings and harness are both from Amazon, the shirt I got off ebay ages ago for vaguely Victorian undershirt, and the hat is from the Southern California Renaissance Faire.

So if you too want to learn leatherworking, the internet is a fantastic place! I seriously went from zero knowledge to making something just by watching videos over the course of a couple months.

And now I have way too many leather projects on deck fighting for time with my sewing projects. Such is the crafty life…