I have owed a friend a bracer for over a year. This month we lost our beloved cat Auzz and I desperately needed a distraction from the grief, so leatherwork came to the rescue. What I have discovered is that I am almost criminally bad at patterning leather (exhibit 1, my wife’s catastrophic purse), but that happily I have built up nearly muscle memory ability to do the actual working of leather if I’m given a pattern. In about a week (maybe less, it was basically a long weekend) I slapped together three projects. This first one is a leather costume bracer. I’ve also finally figured out how to follow some instructions regarding getting leather dyed without marbling effects, thanks to my familiarity with water-based acrylic paint for miniatures. For the first time ever I diluted the dyes and for the first time ever the result was, if not the butter-smooth coats I’d see from an airbrush at least pretty substantially even. I might have diluted too much, the black took 5-10 coats and the the green took 15-20… BUT I managed to achieve the “olive green” requested with the same green dye that got me a forest green for my bracelet below. I’m not nearly as much into leatherwork as I was but I feel like all I needed was these three projects to trip me over the line into “not bad, actually” end results after years of thrashing. Anyway, the pattern was slick and the cutting and punching took me a few hours. The stitching was an eternity of finger-blistering drudge work, but that’s pretty standard and I got through it while watching Stargate SG-1.
Next up was a little skull for my wife, whose interests in biological anthropology and bioarcheaology are overwhelming. Black dye, then a rotating knife to cut the “cracks,” then a couple layers of semi-gloss sealant. Weirdly, the semi-gloss turned out to have an overwhelming effect on the glitter I tried using. My wife had a series of coloured mica powders and I tried adding them to the dye for this piece. It worked very well, I got a nice shimmer effect on it. Then I applied the sealant and the glitter disappeared completely. Maybe it wiped the mica off? Maybe it just coated the shiny flecks with a flood of partly matte reflection killer? Who knows, but thankfully my wife’s happy with a black skull instead of a glittery black skull.
Finally, I’ve been meaning to make myself a charm bracelet of sorts. I have some items symbolic of my personal history- deer antler, caragana branch, an image of the moon the night of my wedding- and I’ll be wiring them onto this. Once again it was from a pattern and once again I had a real easy time of it.
