Casing Your Leather Work

Video Transcript

"Ok, so here I have three pieces of leather here that have all been tanned with basically vegetable processes. You can see that there all different colors but that's not because they have any dyes in them, actually these leathers don't have any dyes in them right now, this is just the colors that develop from the different chemical tanning processes that are used. All three of these types can be used for tooling, one of the first things that you do when you begin to tool leather, is you have to case it. And that just basically means moistening it so that you get a nice kind of moist core with kind of the inside of the leather but you don't want to put too much water on it when you're doing that because that can make the leather mushy and make it difficult to hold an impression or to tool. So, when you case leather properly, you want to kind of have your sponge here and kind of squeeze out some of the water and so, for example, if we take this piece you kind of wet it all over and you'll see that the first thing that happens is it gets kind of a dark color as it starts to absorb that water. But if you wait a few seconds, you can sort of see this, that kind of dark color sort of starts to go away a bit. And so we really haven't changed the surface color of the leather too much and so that's how you kind of know that it's cased at about the right point. So you might want to keep going, you know, maybe brush it a few more times with the wet sponge, let the leather soak in. And so you want, what your, shooting for is a piece of leather that's wet in the core but still sort of almost dry to the touch on the outside. And the color it gets shouldn't be much darker then the color it was when it was dry and so it just takes some practice to get it cased to about the right point but once that leather is cased, kind of has that wet core, that will allow you to tool it down with different kinds of tools and it'll retain the impression."