How to Make Leatherwork Lacing

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 raw hide sheath, or the raw hide 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. We have our lacing here, so we'll soak it for a little while longer, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to kind of a, give you an idea of what this is going to take shape as. So basically what I've got here is another piece that's already been worked on a little bit and we're going to talk about the actual lacing process. What you want to do, is you want to go through your sheath, when it's open and divided in half from here to here, and make sure you mark and indicate with a pen or whatever you're using, where you want your holes. I tried to space mine about a quarter of an inch apart. This is done with a pen, you can scribe it with a marker or rather with a nail if you like, but then folding the sheath in half securing one end, and then simply beginning to use your lace to go through. As this soaks in water, one thing that tends to happen is the holes tend to close back up, so you want to use your tool to make sure that they stay open and that allows you to feed your lace through, make sure that we do it from the correct direction here so that all the lacing is going the right way. And we just feed it through, stitch at a time, pull it tight. Feed it through, stitch at a time, pull it tight. Very simple, very repetitive process. Not terribly exciting, but it's really exciting to actually see it take shape and begin to look like a knife sheath. I love that it's sewn together with a raw hide, with its own, with its own hide actually. I used to use center which is a thread like ligament that is a pretty nice traditional way of doing things as well. But what I found that with repeated use of the knife is that, it tends to eventually cut."