How to Trace Shapes for Leatherwork

Video Transcript

"Hi. This is Eric Sterns with Expert Village. We are covering some basic leather work today. And we're going to be looking at the construction of a traditional style knife sheath. Right now what we're looking at is actually after soaking the rawhide sheath or the rawhide for the sheath, to make it flexible we're going to be scratching out the actual shape of the sheath that we want. And cutting the basic correct size piece that will actually become the knife sheath. So we have our sheet here that's been soaked for about 30, 40 minutes so it's nice and flexible and pliable. Although actually I can feel it around the edges already starting to dry and harden a little bit which gives me an indication of my time. I want to put it down on a towel to soak up the excess water. This allows me to draw on it. If it were opaque and I was not going to be seeing the one side that I was working on, I could use a pen or pencil or anything of that nature. Since it's translucent, I'm actually going to scratch the shape with a nail so that after I cut it there wont be any visible pen or pencil marks. What you do is you take your knife, set it down on the sheath wherever you want it and you kind of get an idea of the shape that you want to use for the sheath. And you're going to double it's size. So you're kind of making and you can change this, this might get a little bit thinner, it might get a little bit thicker. The shape might become a little more custom. What we'll do is we'll fit it and then if it's what we want we'll keep it. If it's not, we can trim some away. It's better to make it larger in the beginning and trim some down than it is to make it too small and not have anywhere to go. So that's basically scratching the basic shape into the leather. Now we go back with scissors. Once again, using regular scissors because the material is so pliable, and we cut out the basic shape for the sheath and this'll take us around. And we may, like I said previously, we may want to alter this later on and that's going to be determined by putting the knife back on to it, bending it in half and seeing what kind of sheath this ultimately will give us."