Understand Why You Should Case Your Leather Work

Video Transcript

"Alright, so here's two pieces of leather that have basically been tanned using the same process. This one looks darker because this one has been cased with water and this one's still dry. So, I have just kind of a simple tool here with kind of a little flower design in the tip of it. I'm going to show you the difference of what it looks like if you do it on cased leather verses a leather that hasn't been cased, it's still dry. Actually let me a, I'll just put a little more kind of moisture on this one here, so again, the goal is to have kind of a wet core but still somewhat dry on the outside. Ok, we'll let that soak in, so I have my tool here, and I'm just going to just do a single strike kind of impression, oh about here, k? And you know it didn't impress that great, maybe I could hit a little bit harder. Let's see, let me try one here, maybe hit it a little bit harder, k, so you can see it's made an impression here. If I do it on the dry leather, it really doesn't make much of an impression. Now with the single strike tools, I mean a lot of times, I guess if I just kind of sit here and just wail on it I can get an impression but you know this really isn't proper leather tooling technique. You want to be able to have a nice cased supple leather that's kind of moist on the inside, where you don't really have to bully it into taking the impression. So, I've just kind of put some more moisture on this and just let it soak in a bit here. There it goes. You can see it disappearing from the surface of the leather. So here, we'll try doing another impression here and just kind of a, and you can see that it took that impression a lot easier with one strike than this one, which I had to hit it five or six times really hard. Ok, that's the difference with working cased leather and dry leather."