How to Cut Rawhide Leather

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Eric Sterns with Expert Village, we're discussing some basic leather work today, some craft work, and we're going to be constructing a traditional style of knife sheath. What we're talking about right now is the process of actually cutting the rawhide and the lacing for sewing the knife sheath together and soaking it in water, so that it's workable. What we've done is this is about the size of the rawhide, that you want to cut, to make a simple sheath. So what I've done, I've taken a sheet, that is already been cut that way. You can see how ridged and stiff this is. I've already soaked one piece that is cut the same way. Soaked for about thirty minutes, in water, and as you can see, it's completely flexible, completely pliable, easily manipulated, turned, bent, for whatever purposes you need. So what we're going to do, is we're going to, now, take some scissors, and I'll show you how simple this is with regular scissors, once the hide is actually soaked, in water, it becomes pliable, is to go around the edge, where we're not going to take away from the volume of the sheath, itself, or the hide we're going to use for the shape of the sheath, and actually cut out some simple lacing that we can easily use, to lace together the hide, once it's formed into the shape of the sheath that we like. And there we go. Now we have a completely good piece of workable rawhide lace, that is flexible, has already been soaked, and I've cut it to a point, on one end. This is important because it is going to be used as a self contained needle, to go through the holes that we make in the rawhide, since you can't really thread this stuff through any kind of a needle. This is my substitute."