How to Use a Knife Sharpener for Your Leather Work

Video Transcript

"Okay, so one important thing to know how to do before you start using your knives is how to keep them sharp. The reason you want to keep your leather knife sharp is, there's a few reasons. The main is, the main reason is that they really glide through the leather a lot more smoothly if they're kept sharp. If they, once they start to dull, they kind of tend to catch the leather and they kind of have sort of a jagged sort of staggered motion when you're cutting. So the sharper they are, the smoother they'll move through the leather and through the more control you'll have and the better looking your cuts will be. So, the way you sharpen your knives is, you just take a piece of leather, this is a piece we've already kind of tooled on one side, there's the little leaf we were working on before. This is a piece of scrap. The other side is kind of more this unfinished sort of rough, grained, kind of velvety side here. That's the side you use as a polishing strop. So, what you need is a piece of this, which is called jewelers rouge, it's kind of a, sort of a chalky substance. It's kind of comes in a big stick like this. You can get it wet, I'm going to put some, let's see, I want to kind of get some water onto my strop here, sort of like casing it, then I'm going to kind of rub my jewelers rouge in it. You see it kind of, this white stuff is kind of coming off and I'm getting sort of, kind of a little, sort of like a little emulsion here between the jewelers rouge and the water and the leather. Kind of a, get this sort of little sludge here. So now what I'm going to do, in order to sharpen my knife, you kind of get the blade, kind of right at the correct angle, right so you see there's a double edge blade. So you get it so that that blade is right on the strop and you just sort of draw it towards you, kind of repeatedly. You notice, as I'm drawing it towards myself, I'm not changing the angle, right. I'm not, like drawing it and then sort of lifting it up like this. I'm keeping it at the same angle with every pull. Then I can turn it over and kind of line up the blade again, on the other side and also continue to pull like this. So, what's happening is, even though the blade is made of steel, the combination of like the texture side of the leather with kind of the abrasive that's in the jewelers rouge is actually, with enough strokes, it is sharpening your knife and it's making your blade a lot smoother. It'll be a lot better blade to work with."