Understand the Kits & Stretching of Leather Working

Video Transcript

"So, some of these kits come with a piece of leather that is actually already to the right size and has holes kind of up and down the edges where you'll do your stitching. So that's true for this kind of piece of leather that goes around for this little flask kit here. Here's a kit for a, basically, a knife sheath. Here it's kind of snapped together now and you see it kind of has these holes and everything is already pre-cut and pre-punched to kind of line everything up. Of course you don't have to buy kits, I mean, there's a lot of patterns out there where you can cut the leather yourself into these different shapes and you can use leather punches to make these holes. You know, they make certain punches that will make these holes in kind of a regularly spaced pattern so that the holes line up for the stitching. So, you don't have to work from kits, you can make your own parts but kind of the point I want to make now is if you are working with something that is kind of a kit, where the pieces have already been pre-cut to fit, so for example, this piece is a certain shape and the holes are already there and it's going to be really important when I've finished tooling it, before I assemble it that those holes still line up. Same thing with this piece of leather which is for that little flask kit here right? That it has a certain kind of width and length to it so that it fits around that flask perfectly ok? And will be able to be stitched together. So it's important then that while you're tooling it, because you want to do your tooling first, you do your tooling before assembly. It's important when your tooling that, that process doesn't stretch the leather out so one thing that a lot of people like to do is actually, you wouldn't do it on your work surface but you might use like a piece of card board or something like that to actually use rubber cement and cement the thing down and let it dry. So then as your tooling then it won't stretch out and it won't become distorted."