#long-form tutorial

[armory-rasa]

Manticore Potion Pouch: pattern & tutorial

Hey folks, it’s been a while since I put up a freebie tutorial, so here we go, Geralt’s potion pouch from the manticore armor set in The Witcher 3.

It’s a quick and easy little project, good for beginning leatherworkers, and when it’s done you’ll have a versatile little bottle holder that will go with just about any LARP/steampunk/renfaire outfit:

Click down for pattern & step by step instructions! 😊

Before you do anything else, you have to know how big your bottles are, because unfortunately this is not a one-size-fits-all pattern. The bottles I found that were the best size/shape were the mini bottles of Hendricks gin:

If you can get your hands on some, perfect -- print the following at 100% scale, on cardstock if you’ve got it:

(It is designed for 8.5″x11″ paper -- if you’re printing on A4 paper it may come out a hair different.)

If you’re using a different bottle: measure the circumference of the bottle in cm and multiply it by 8, that is the % scale to print at.

Once you’ve figured all that out and gotten it printed, cut everything out and tape the strap pieces together on the dotted lines:

Now cut them out in leather:

I used 6-7 oz latigo for this, but if you don’t have latigo, you can sub in 6-7 oz veg-tan, you’ll just have to dye & topcoat it yourself. (If you are buying leather for this project, a single shoulder is the smallest hide you can purchase, it will run you ~$40 and leave you with plenty leftover for other projects. 👍)

(If your leather is thinner, you will have to adjust the straps slightly, or they will be too loose and your bottles will be prone to falling out.)

Next step is to run a decorative crease along the edges of all your straps:

The tool for this is the stitching groover; here you are using the modeling head, but in a moment you’ll be using the grooving head too, so if you don’t have one of these, it is worth buying. I put creases around the straps about 1/8″ from the edges.

And now here is the grooving head in action, carving out a channel for your stitching:

This is not, strictly speaking, necessary, but it will make your stitches much tidier and less vulnerable to abrasion. Make a groove around the backing piece, about 1/4″ from the edge.

In the next step I used a spacing tool to mark where to punch the holes for stitching:

But if you don’t have one, no harm done -- you can use a ruler and an awl and mark a dot every 1/4″. (When I’m doing very large stitches like this, I use the smallest spacer wheel and just punch every other hole.)

Punching your stitching holes:

If you don’t have a hand sewing punch, you can just use an awl -- it’s slower, but will get you the same results. 👍

Saddle stitch around the edge of the backing piece:

(Thread (of which this takes 57″) and needles)

Now grab your awl and your pattern pieces again, and use the sharp tip to mark the holes:

Punch your rivet holes. Rivet holes will be ~2mm wide; the slots are made with an oblong punch or a manual workaround.

Assembly time! Start by riveting your back-to-front little straps on top of your side-to-side little straps, at right angles:

I used small antique-nickel double-cap rivets for this. Now rivet the end labeled FRONT to the lower strap as shown:

Now it gets kinda funky and awkward to set your rivets, but I believe in you:

Now thread the BACK end of the mini straps through the half-inch slots on the backing piece, and rivet them down:

Finish riveting the lower strap to the backing, and then do the same for the upper strap:

Test fit of bottles:

Perfect.

And there you have it!

(I buy corks in bulk from aliexpress, for this exact purpose -- you will probably be stuck with the screw-on caps that they come with. >_<)

[armory-rasa]

DYE DYE DYE

Or, A Comprehensive Guide to Coloring Leather So, you’ve got a project you’re doing, you want to make it, say, black, and you walk into Tandy to buy your supplies, all, “I’m…

I’ll probably continue tweaking it over the next couple days, but HOLY CATS, FOLKS, I DONE A TUTORIAL ON DYEING.

A comprehensive guide to coloring leather -- because it’s harder than it looks.

[armory-rasa]

Long tutorial time: How to Take Product Photos That Don’t Suck

If you’re trying to sell your handcrafted work online, then your photos matter so much -- I daresay almost more than the work itself.

“Upcycled” items that are literal trash (but attractively photographed!) can sucker people into paying actual money for them. And on the flip side, the best-quality leatherwork in the world is going to look dubious af when the product shots were obviously taken in someone’s kitchen, lit by fluorescent lights and a camera flash.

You will get more sales and you will be able to charge more for your work if you have professional-looking product photos -- not fair, maybe, but true. So today I am going to show you how to create decent-looking stock photos, ie, a picture of just the thing itself on a backdrop.

(The cat is unrelated -- clickbait, really.)

I’ll admit upfront that I am very, very far from being a photography expert, and I'm sure an expert could do better than me, but I can't afford an expert and probably neither can you. And this isn’t about the mechanics anyway, it’s about the setup, and just making these small changes can seriously up your game.

Step one: camera

Unless you've already got a good camera, your best bet is going to be a smartphone -- and make no mistake, smartphones are a close second, not a distant one. Modern smartphones are phenomenal, they’re far better than even slightly-dated digital cameras. They can't get you the soft-focus background that an actual, professional camera can (the lens simply isn't long enough), but you can approximate that effect with photoshop if you want to, and the set-up I'm demonstrating here doesn't need a fuzzed background anyway.

The only critical feature is that your camera can take sharp, in-focus pictures.

If you don't have a good smartphone, find a friend who does and beg/wheedle/blackmail/bully them into letting you use it for a bit.

Honestly, I've got a good camera, and half the time I still wind up using my phone because I’m too lazy to bust it out.

Step two: backdrop

There are a lot of artistic things you can do if you're taking pictures of a product in situ -- action shots, still lifes, pictures of it worn by models -- and all that will help your customers visualize themselves using the item, but it's also vital to have pictures of JUST the thing, pictures that cleanly and clearly show exactly what the customer is going to be receiving in exchange for the money they throw at you -- aka stock photos.

And for stock photos, you don't want to get creative with your background. In fact, if you can use the same background for many/most of your images, it will contribute to an attractive, coherent look for your shop. That means finding a neutral-toned backdrop that will work with any color item you put on top of it -- white, black, grey, beige, basically.

White can mean a lightbox...

(And there are a million tutorials online for how to rig up your own DIY lightbox)

...or another popular alternative is a white table pushed up against a white wall; the seam between the two is visible, but discreet enough that the eye glides right over it.

Black, you can do with cleverdick manipulation of the settings on an expensive camera, or you can find a non-reflective black backdrop -- which is easier said than done. Fine, dense, matte black velvet (think theatre curtains) is the go-to black backdrop, just make sure you run a lint roller over it before taking pics.

Any other color is going to depend on the backdrop you choose -- I personally have had excellent luck with some warm-grey velvet (?) yardage that I picked up for pennies at a goodwill a million years ago. (I’m not sure what it is -- it has the pile of velvet, but shorter?) I didn’t buy it for that purpose, but it’s since proven to be an incredibly versatile backdrop, and I’ve taken to using it for everything:

etc.

And even if you’re not stumbling onto a super-good-deal at goodwill, a yard or two of your chosen fabric will generally do you fine.

What I don’t recommend is:

- shiny fabric (anything shiny is overall more difficult to photograph -- and shiny spots will draw attention to themselves, rather than your product)

- vivid colors (limits what color items you can display on it; will often clash if the item is close-but-not-quite-the-same color (and what looks fine to your eye may not look fine on film); can distract from the item you’re showcasing)

- patterns (again, distracts from the centerpiece; draws attention to the background; moreover, is hell to clone-brush)

Here is all three of them being the perfect storm of not-a-good-stock-photo:

Which is not to say you can’t do something artistic with it...

...but it’s not very versatile, and it’s not exactly “stock photo” anymore.

One of the reasons I really really like velvet for a backdrop is that there’s nothing in the world easier to clone brush. Which happens, for instance, if I get my roll of photos transferred to the computer and realize there’s some lint I neglected to brush off, or if I was too lazy to iron my backdrop so it’s got wrinkles/creases in it, or if the angle I had to take the photograph from clipped the edge of the backdrop--

--it is super fuckin’ easy to clone all that out. (It also takes the burn tool really well, to darken the edges and point the viewer’s attention toward the middle of the picture, see above.)

Other backdrops that can work are fur (or faux fur):

The great outdoors: mulch, leaves, dirt, sand, etc--

(That was taken at my shitty old apartment complex, so I had to carefully remove the cigarette butts from the shot first. -_-)

(I admit I’ve mostly stopped using these kind of outdoor backdrops -- they’re harder to pull off than wood/concrete/fabric -- but in the hands of someone with an eye for composition, they can definitely be used to good effect, so I’m including them here anyway. You just want to make sure that the background isn’t distracting from the item, which you can sometimes do in post by darkening/fuzzing the background relative to the focal object.)

Concrete:

And wood:

In short, there are many things that are (1) unobtrusive and (2) neutral-colored that will make excellent backdrops.

Professional photography backdrops (essentially, the velvet I have) are close to true neutral, not affecting the “feel” of the picture at all, and there are tons of tutorials online to make your own DIY photography backdrops.

Conversely, you can also use a specific backdrop to help create the mood you want to convey for the piece -- concrete for gritty and urban; fur to evoke a rich and sumptuous feeling (or a primitive one, depending on what you’re selling); wood or rough-spun cloth for something rustic; dirt and leaves to take it back to nature.

I’m not going to say the sky’s the limit, because we’re talking stock photos not ARRRRT!!, you gotta rein it in a bit, but you do have a lot of options -- anything that’s not going to clash with the mood or distract from your product.

Step three: lighting

USE THE FUCKING SUN.

Don’t ever, ever use a flash for product photography, seriously, are you some kind of SAVAGE?

Cardinal sin right there; go straight to hell, do not pass go, etc. Lighting like that, your product looks like it’s drunk at a frat party.

Moreover, unless you are a wildly over-funded professional, and possibly not even then, there is no light source superior to the sun. Sure, if you finish your project at midnight and can’t wait to share it, take some snapshots in your shitty studio light and send them to your friends--

--but do not make that your product listing photo. You can do so much better.

(And notice the color difference too -- natural light tends to be much better at capturing color that is true-to-life. The second picture is far more accurate to the actual item.)

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That said, direct sunlight is a HELL NO go. The shadows it casts are way too stark, and details can get lost because the camera has trouble navigating the gap between the super-dark parts of the picture and the super-bright parts.

And it turned out that I’d never bothered to keep any of the photos I took in direct sunlight (because they sucked), so for the purposes of this tutorial, I had to take a couple of my WIPs outside and go make some.

Direct sunlight:

The glare and the obvious shadows make these photos look strikingly amateurish. It draws attention to the background, highlights the fact that the bracers are just sitting in some lame dead grass. These photos look like someone finished making the bracer, carried it ten feet out into their backyard, and snapped a picture.

Which, yeah, is what we’re doing, but it doesn’t have to look it.

By contrast, indirect sunlight, when I move it four feet over into the shade of the house:

Right away, the diffused light (sort of soft-focus?) is more in line with what you see in professional photos. They still need editing before they’d be ready to roll out -- fiddling with contrast/saturation/white balance; clone-brushing out some of the distracting elements in the background; darker shading around the frame to center attention on the product -- but they have the potential to be decent photos now, instead of being critically flawed from the get-go.

When you’re using sunlight as your source, you’re usually going to be setting up either outside in the shade, or inside next to a window.

The context for some of these shots can also be hilariously un-sexy when you zoom out:

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Sunlight tends to be much better at retaining the textural details of your work too, because more light means your camera can take a much quicker shot (low light = camera compensates by leaving the lens open longer to collect more light = blur).

If you want to really capture the fine texture of an item, natural light coming from one side (like through a window) is perfect, because of the shadows it casts:

On that note: if you’re trying to use a window as your light source, you may have trouble with the far side of the object being completely lost in darkness:

Which can be artistic, but doesn’t make for a great stock photo.

The solution is not to use another light source, but to use a reflector -- my go-to is white foam-core posterboard:

Which can fill in the shadows that are obscuring parts of your work:

Mirrors or foil can work for this too, but they tend to cast stark/uneven light, whereas the white board diffuses it, and diffusion is pretty much always what you want.

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On the subject of diffusion: overcast days are your BEST FRIEND. They basically turn the whole sky into a lightbox for you. You get soft, beautiful light from all directions, muted enough to reduce glare, but there’s still more than enough light to keep your camera happy and your details sharp. 

(Man I wish there were more clouds where I lived.)

Here’s an interesting little contrast -- this one was taken on a sunny day, but in the shadow of my house, using a white reflector to move light around:

And then the very next day we had rain, and I was like, hell yeah, and took it outside for more pics:

Obviously both have had the contrast increased to bring out the details, but the mood difference between the two is 100% the weather.

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And that is FAR from everything there is to say on the subject of photography lighting, but for the purposes of amateur product photography, those are the important bits.

TL;DR:

- Natural light

- Diffused light

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Step 4: post-production

This is also not something I’m an expert in, I’ve learned just enough to get by and called it good enough. (It’s why I lean on overcast days whenever I can, because it eliminates a lot of the lighting problems that I don’t know how to fix in post.)

But here are some of the things that you will find yourself needing to know, and should be looking up how-to’s on for your graphics editor of choice:

White balance/saturation

Light comes in different colors, but the human eye automatically compensates for it, so often times something looks good to your eyes, but then comes out way funky on film.

Indoor lighting tends to be yellow-hued, because that’s what feels warm and comfortable to humans, but it looks nasty in photographs:

Natural light tends to be white (which is why it gives you more accurate colors), getting more blueish as it heads toward evening:

You can compensate for both by adjusting the white balance, in which the program figures out what white is supposed to look like, and then calibrates all the other colors in the picture accordingly.

Brightness/contrast

Is it bright enough to see the details? Is the contrast high enough to make the details POP, instead of blending together into a muddle?

You can apply brightness/contrast adjustments to the full image, and then (if necessary) go in by hand with the burn/dodge tool (brightness up/brightness down) and add extra highlights.

(Don’t go overboard on this though -- this isn't art, this is a product photo, and if you take it too far from the real object, you are lying in your advertising.)

Blur/sharpen

Are the focal points sharp? Sharp areas of an image are what draws the eye, so if your photos are blurry, they’re no good and there’s no fixing them -- grab your camera and go take some more.

Is your background less sharp than the foreground? A too-sharp background will distract from the central point, so sometimes you can put a very subtle blur on it to trick the eye into ignoring it. (Dropping the brightness and the contrast are also both ways to make the background less eye-catching.)

Clone brush

Basically a mini copy-paste tool, you grab parts of the image and copy it onto other parts. This is good for tidying up your background -- coloring in corners that your backdrop didn’t cover, or removing distracting irregularities.

Again, this is one to be used sparingly, because this is product photography, it needs to be accurate, not idealized. You don’t get to scrub off the imperfections and make it look like you’re better at [whatever] than you are.

The only time I consider it acceptable to use the clone brush tool on the actual product is for editing out flaws in the leather itself. It’s a stock photo; customers are not going to be getting the exact item shown in the photo. I’ll be making a new one for them, one that’s not going to have those exact flaws. (It’ll have excitingly new and different flaws! Such is the nature of organic materials.)

Edge gradients

A subtle shadow around the edge of your picture brings the whole thing together, makes the background recede a bit, and directs the eye toward the centerpiece. Too heavy a hand with this will still look nice, but more staged; it alerts the viewer that you’ve been photoshopping and kills the “I woke up like this~” illusion.

Relatively natural:

Dramatic!

Watermarking

You want people to be able to find their way back to you when your work inevitably gets cross-posted without the source (fuck you in the face, pinterest), so it’s not enough to put your initials or abstract logo or illegible signature on it, you need your google-able name or company name.

At the same time, people have been known to crop out (or clone-brush out) watermarks that are big and tacky, so it’s in your best interests to make your watermark tasteful and inoffensive. (Also: ugly watermarks just bring down your whole image, seriously.)

Some of the pictures above are old enough that they’re sporting my older & less professional-looking watermarks, but what I use at the moment is this:

(But, y’know, smaller.)

Best way to do watermarks is usually to create another layer over your image and blend the two. For dark logo/light background, the settings for the new layer are 1) blend mode: multiply, 2) opacity: 85% (adjust as needed). For light logo/dark background, the blend mode is probably going to be “soft light.” And then just paste your logo in the corner of the new layer -- the blend mode means your logo doesn’t have to be transparent, the program just ignores the parts that are lighter/darker than the background.

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And that, I believe, is the end. o_O I had no idea I had so many opinions on the subject of product photography.

Again -- I’m not a pro. I don’t know how to use 99% of my camera settings or 80% of my graphics program. (For fuck’s sake, my go-to graphics editor is the bootleg version of Paintshop Pro that I acquired in 1997.) This post represents the sum total of my knowledge on the subject.

But it just goes to show that you can do a lot with only a little, and that your composition and sense of aesthetics are far more important than what gear you’ve got.

[armory-rasa]

Leatherworking tutorial: Finishing your edges

A key feature in making your work look polished and professional is having good edges—all too often I see leatherwork that would otherwise be quite good, but is being brought low by ugly, fuzzy edges. Once you know what to look for, you can’t un-see it -- it looks sloppy and unfinished, and immediately flags the maker as an amateur.

So show your attention to detail by having good edges. There are two basic steps to it:

Round off the sharp corners

Slick down the fuzzies

STEP 1: BEVELING

When you cut leather, it doesn't make a nice rounded edge, it makes a straight line. This isn't very noticeable on thin leather (<5 oz) but the thicker you go, the more pronounced the square edges become.

The tool to take off those sharp edges is called an edge beveler:

It has a very tiny blade (~1 mm) set between two tines, and it skives off just that sharpest corner. Edge bevelers come in different blade lengths, but I recommend going with the smallest, Craftool's size 2.

(Technically using the edge beveler gives you a hexagonal edge instead of a square edge—which to the human eye usually rounds up to round, but if it still looks unattractively angular you can run some medium-grit sandpaper over it. Just be sure that you're sanding only the edge, and not scraping the sandpaper over your top grain.)

Do this to both the top side and the underside of your piece.

You have to do this step before dyeing or shaping—because the leather has to be flat to use the edge beveler, and if you dye before you shave the edges off, you'll wind up having to dye the edges again. I usually do this as the step after tooling, while the leather is still damp -- because the moisture lubricates the blade, making your cuts cleaner and extending the lifespan of your blade -- but it can be done dry.

This concludes step 1, you are now allowed to dye, shape, and dry your project.

👍

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If you don't have an edge beveler, and you're going to be doing more leatherworking in the future, I highly recommend getting one. They're not a MUST HAVE, but they're in my first round of picks for “tools that will make your life infinitely easier.” They're not expensive, and moreover, there is no good substitute method for skiving your edges.

...But maybe you're not in a position to get one (or maybe it's 3 AM the night before your convention as you're desperately trying to finish your bracers). In which case, you should still be making some effort to round off the edges. If you have a very deft hand with an exacto blade you can try to manually skive it down (and that's the only way to bevel tight, inset corners), but it's hard to keep a steady pressure, and you probably won't be able to do the entire length in one smooth stroke.

I suspect you'd be better off just sanding it. If you have a dremel with a sanding drum, it will take the corners off very quickly, but not particularly cleanly. Again, it's hard to keep steady pressure doing it manually, your edge will probably come out lumpy. (That said, even slightly lumpy is better than square, imo.) Doing it with a sanding block or a piece of sandpaper under your fingertips will be a lot slower, but more even.

Both methods of sanding will throw off a lot of leather fuzzies, like sawdust—don't worry about it, you'll be dealing with the fuzzies in step 2. Just wear a mask over your face so you're not breathing it in, because you don't even want to know what leather is tanned with.

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A note on sharpening edge bevelers: Good Luck.

The edge beveler has a blade, so it will start to get dull after a while, and you'll find yourself having to apply a lot more pressure to push it through the leather, and the cuts it makes will be jaggy instead of smooth and clean like they were when the tool was new.

And edge bevelers are not supposed to be disposable, but I've never managed to sharpen them with any degree of success. There are allegedly ways it can be done, you can google it and maybe you'll have better luck than I've had—I've just resigned myself to buying a new one whenever mine starts to get unruly. (Luckily they’re cheap on AliExpress -- you can actually find a LOT of leatherworking tools for a steal there.)

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STEP 2: BURNISHING

Skiving off the corners improves the situation considerably, but your edges are still rough (and possibly fuzzy):

So next you'll be working some kind of binding substance into the fibers, and burnishing it with some kind of friction.

If that sounds vague, it's because your options for both binding substance and friction are nearly infinite, and this is where everyone develops their own method and preferences. (Seriously, ask ten different leatherworkers how they do their edges, and you'll get ten different answers.)

This is the step after dyeing, because your binding substance gets smeared around and will keep the leather from absorbing dye in those places, so it needs to be dyed already.

One option is gum tragacanth (usually shortened to gum trag) and an edge slicker, both of which are cheap and beginner-friendly.  

Working in small sections, glop on some gum trag and spread it out along the exposed edge. (I use a paintbrush in combination with my fingertips—gloves are optional, because gum trag isn't toxic, doesn't stain, and rinses off easily. It is slimy and fun!)

Then while it's still wet, take your edge burnisher and rub it vigorously along the edge with the gum trag. That works the gum trag into the leather and packs down the stray fibers, for a cool, glossy edge.

Le voila! Move on to the next section, rinse and repeat.

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Gum trag + burnishing rod can also smooth out the under-surface of your project, either for aesthetics (to make it look and feel more professional) or practicality (if the fibrous underside is uncomfortably scratchy). Flip your project over and glop gum trag onto the fuzzy underside, then use the long flat end of the burnisher to rub down swathes of it. Easy as that.

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Other binding substances that people have used:

beeswax

Tan Kote (I hate this stuff)

saddle soap (I’ve actually taken to using this more than gum trag, it slicks up VERY nicely)

carnuba cream

saliva (WHY?? licking leather is only one step above licking envelopes??)

Many other things that I've forgotten about or have never even heard of

Other methods of making friction:

Rubbing canvas over it

Belt sander with extremely fine grit sandpaper

Burnishing drum on a dremel

...I swear knew at least one more but I forget

So be resourceful, be creative—this is an area of leatherworking where there's a lot of room for variation as long as you've got (1) something to slick the fibers down and (2) friction.

(http://www.instructables.com/id/Wooden-Leather-Burnisher/)

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If your edges are supposed to be a different color from the rest of your project, there's an Eco-Flo product called Edge Flex that you can paint over the edges, and there are special applicator tools for applying it cleanly. This is valuable for people who specialize in belts and have miles of edges to do, and can't afford to painstaking hand-paint every inch of them.

That's not me, and I dislike the look of contrast-color edges anyway, so I've never bothered to pick up that skill. But if that's the effect you want, then Edge Flex and edge applicators are what you should be looking into.

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So that is how to edge like a pro -- I hope you found it helpful and I apologize for all the stock images I cribbed off google. XD Someday maybe I’ll update it with pictures of me doing all the things.

[armory-rasa]

Costume Leatherworking 101

or, Everything You Didn’t Even Know You Needed To Know About Leather

Hello everyone!

This is Gabriel from Armory Rasa, with the first installment in my series on leatherworking for cosplay. Leather can be a daunting material to get started with because it has a reputation for being both expensive and esoteric, and most of the information out there is for teaching you how to make cowboy paraphernalia. (Joy of joys.) My goal is to create a comprehensive guide focused on armor and fantasy leatherworking, one that will equip the beginning leatherworker with all of the information and skills they need for a solid foundation in the craft.

So welcome to Part 1, which is about the different types of leather and how to choose the correct one for your project. This is the required reading, the jumping-off point for all my other tutorials, cuz you gotta know this stuff first.

PART I: TYPES OF LEATHER

Okay, so when you walk into the leather store you're going to be confronted with approximately eleventy-million different options:

(Tandy Leather -- that’s the store. When people ask where to buy leather stuff, the answer is probably going to be Tandy, and I say this so often that they really ought to be sponsoring me. -_-)

But broadly speaking, there are only two things you need to know the difference between: vegetable-tan (often called veg-tan) and chrome-tan. This is referring to the tanning process, not the animal it came from -- it’s all going to be cowhide unless it’s specifically labeled something else.

And this is where a lot of newbies run into confusion, because veg-tan and chrome-tan are both ‘leather,’ but they feel and behave entirely differently, and there is almost zero overlap in the kinds of projects you can use them for.

This is veg-tan:

Veg-tan leather tends to be flat and stiff, with a matte, porous surface. It always comes undyed, in that distinctive pinkish-tan color. (It also smells kind of bad, in my opinion; it’s not the rich leather smell that people wax rapturous about.) When it’s dry, it behaves about the same way foam or plastic does -- it's lightweight and holds its shape, and you can bend it, but when you let go, it's going to spring right back.

Veg-tan is the leather that can be tooled, like the example above (and many more examples to come), a process where you carve lines into the leather with a special knife and then use stamps to give it texture and depth. It’s also the leather that can be molded into three-dimensional shapes.

For most people, their experience with veg-tan is going to be belts, shoes, certain purses and bags, and small molded cases. (Or holsters and saddles, if that's how they roll.)

(Those are not my handiwork, but all of the other examples are unless stated otherwise.)

For cosplayers, on the other hand, here are some of the things you’d use veg-tan for:

(All of those, by the way, started out the default pinkish-tan -- there will be a later installment on how to dye veg-tan.)

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Meanwhile, this is chrome-tan:

This is what you use to make your leather pants, jackets, sofas, car seats, catsuits, dice bags, etc.

Chrome-tan leather comes in a lot more variety than veg-tan. It has the dye infused as part of the tanning process, so it already has a color when you buy it and -- with very few exceptions -- you cannot dye it again. Sometimes it has a shiny, almost plasticky surface, and sometimes a textured surface where you can feel the grain of the leather. It is soft and flexible, very similar to the pleather or vinyl you could buy at a fabric store, but heavier and with a more natural drape. The underside is suede -- sometimes both sides are suede, if it’s been skived into multiple layers -- and it has that lovely leather smell.

(These upstanding citizens I found on google are proudly wearing chrome-tan from head to toe. Or pleather. It’s often hard to tell in pictures.)

Chrome-tan is the upscale replacement for pleather; you cannot make armor out of it. Working with chrome-tan is more like a special type of tailoring, and not too different from working with manmade materials, except that it's heavier and tougher, so it requires a powerful sewing machine. A regular sewing machine can manage leather in short bursts, but it puts a lot of pressure on the motor, and you do so at the risk of burning it out.

Almost everything that's not veg-tan is some variety of chrome-tan. I'd venture to say that the bulk of Tandy’s inventory is chrome tan (it has to be, because it has to come already-dyed in all the colors people might want).

The chrome-tanning process was also not invented until the industrial revolution, so to the experienced eye it will look wildly anachronistic in your medieval/renaissance costume. Pre-modern tanning techniques for making soft leather did not produce the glossy surface that you’ll find on most chrome-tan, so for a more natural/historical look, you’ll want the subset of chrome-tan called “oil tan”:

Oil-tan tends to be exceptionally beautiful leather, but be aware that it can pool oil spots onto the things it’s left in contact with. Do not store it together with your veg-tan.

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The one exception to the chrome-tan/veg-tan dichotomy is a material called latigo that is literally both, and takes properties from each of them. It’s sturdy like veg-tan, but flexible like chrome-tan, with a waxy finish. It comes pre-dyed, and can’t be tooled or molded.

Being both strong and bendy makes latigo ideal for belts, straps, and harnesses -- and accordingly, it’s a favorite for both saddle tack and bondage gear.

I keep latigo hides of a few different colors on hand because it’s very convenient to cut straps from, but unless you’re going into fetish leatherworking, latigo is not the droids you’re looking for -- whatever you could use latigo for, you could also use veg-tan, and veg-tan is much more versatile.

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So! To recap, the differences between veg-tan and chrome-tan:

Veg-tan can be carved and tooled; chrome-tan won't take indentations

Veg-tan is not for clothes -- it is way too stiff, you might as well try to make your clothes out of posterboard. Chrome-tan is your garment leather.

Veg-tan can be dyed, it soaks up color like a sponge. Chrome-tan is already colored when you get it, and it has a finish that resists absorbing new dye.

Veg-tan can be molded into hard, three-dimensional shapes by soaking it until it is pliable, and then letting it dry in the desired shape. Chrome-tan is always, always going to stay soft and floppy. It cannot be molded or hardened, no matter if you get it wet, or try to boil it, or put it in the oven -- you won’t make armor, you’ll just ruin it.

Basically, veg-tan is like the pre-modern version of plastic, with infinitely many uses, and chrome-tan is like a really heavy fabric.

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...And that is literally everything I know about chrome-tan, because it is decidedly not my wheelhouse. My specialty is armor, masks, cases, and more armor, so 95% of what I use is veg-tan. When people say ‘leatherworking,’ they’re usually talking about the things you can do with veg-tan, and everything from here on out is going to be specific to veg-tan. So if making leather catsuits is your aim, then I’m afraid I won’t be of much help.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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PART II: WEIGHTS OF LEATHER

Thickness of leather is measured by the ounce, which is confusing for the newbie, but what that means is how many ounces it weighs per square foot. It ranges from 2-3 oz at the thinnest, to about 12 oz at the heaviest. (This page has a chart for converting oz to inches/mm, but you’ll quickly get a feel for it as soon as you start handling leather.)

So what weights do you use for what projects?

(not my handiwork)

2-4 oz is the very thinnest veg-tan, ~1 mm thick. At this weight, there is some overlap with chrome-tan in the projects you can use it for, because 2 oz veg-tan is thin and floppy enough to behave about the same way -- but it’s less strong than the equivalent weight in chrome-tan, because it can tear where chrome-tan would stretch. It’s used for wallets, very small pouches and cases, and for covering journals and books. As a cosplayer, you probably won’t have much use for this stuff.

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4-5 oz is a good weight for small pouches and lightweight bracers. It can hold its shape now, but it’s still very flexible. It allows a lot of stretching when it’s wet, so it’s good for molded cases. It’s good for large hats, because anything thicker will start to get REALLY heavy on your head. (Not that I've made that mistake. >_>) It's also the best weight for small, layered pieces of leather made to resemble feathers or leaves, because it’s thin but not floppy.

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5-6 oz is good for straps, because it's thin enough to be bendy, but thick enough not to get stretched out of shape, making it ideal for fetish gear and for the straps connecting your plate armor to your body. It's usually too thick for small bags, but good for larger cases like quivers. Simple masks, like the domino masks in classic superhero costumes, are done in the 4-6 oz range.

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And now, with 7 oz+, is where it gets interesting (to me anyway) because it starts being thick enough to do my favorite kind of tooling. You can tool leather at the lighter weights, but it won't be very deep or vivid. Tooling is also prone to stretching thin leather in odd ways -- think of it like using a rolling pin on cookie dough, it flattens and spreads it out. (And depending on how much it spreads, tooling thin leather can also change the shape of the piece, which can be troublesome.)

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7-8 oz is good for masks, because it's thin enough that you can still make some very dramatic shapes (necessary when molding it to fit over a face), but it's thick enough to be rigid when it dries, and you can get some very nice deep tooling. It works for smaller pieces of armor, like bracers or headpieces, that aren’t going to have a lot of pressure put on them, and armor that’s made of a lot of layered pieces. It’s also the weight you want for wide trophy belts and the like.

(Regular belts are usually 8-9 oz -- heavier than trophy belts because they’re both narrower and load-bearing.)

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9-10 oz: This is my jam. This is what you use for armor -- pauldrons, bracers, helmets, breastplates, greaves, you name it. It's about 4-5 mm thick, it takes beautifully deep tooling, and it’s very sturdy, with only minimal flexibility. Armor-weight veg-tan is where I live, as an artist and a human being.

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And 10 oz is about the heaviest weight that's commonly available. The only cowhide thicker than that is called sole bend, a type of veg-tan about 12-13 oz, and it’s not only thicker but also compressed to make it way more dense.

Sole bend is quite difficult to work with -- you best have a bandsaw to cut it with -- and it’s already so compressed that you can’t tool on it, so I don't use sole bend unless I'm making actual, functional combat armor, either for re-enactment or larping. And even then, you can get the same level of protection by layering two pieces of 10-oz leather together.

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PART III: WHEN NOT TO USE LEATHER

So this is probably a good time to talk about what kind of armor you can’t use leather for.

Leather’s not good for flat planes and straight, sharp, geometric angles -- anything that's supposed to look like plates of sheet metal welded together.

Because the surface of leather isn’t level and uniform, it has a sort of organic ripple to it (because it is organic, it came off a cow), so it's never going to be flat enough to look right. Moreover, you can't glue the edges together to mimic welding; that's simply not a viable way to permanently attach pieces of leather together, and they’ll fall apart in short order.

For the welded-plate look, you're better off with EVA foam or thermoplastics -- or, as I used for my own Hawke costume, squares of linoleum flooring. That was my baby's first cosplay, and for the leather parts I used real leather, but for the “metal” I used linoleum:

(My sister-in-law, in the Hawke costume.)

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Leather is also unsuitable for chrome effects:

Because that's achieved not by the type of paint you use, but by polishing the surface of the material itself to a mirror finish. Leather is too porous, it CANNOT get that smooth, ever, it’s just not gonna happen. The closest you can come is with a clever paint job that uses contouring tricks to give the impression of high shine:

But you can see that it’s still going to have a visible surface texture.

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On the other hand, leather is brilliant at mimicking aged metal, particularly if it's got a lot of intricate carving -- in essence, the more design or texturing you have on the surface, the easier it is to disguise the fact that it's leather and not actually metal.

Leather can achieve a very good hammered-metal effect just by putting an uneven texture in the surface -- because then when you go to paint it, it produces a very realistic weathered and lived-in look. I’ve talked a bit about texturing before, and I’ll go into more detail about it in my installment on painting leather, but it’s really the same technique you’d use to paint any other material.

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So there you have it -- chrome-tan and veg-tan and oil-tan and latigo, what they’re good for and what they’re not, and what the different weights are used for. If there’s anything that’s unclear, hit me up with an ask! This is still a work in progress. And don’t forget to follow me if you’d like to keep up with future tutorials. :)

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