Sydney trip part two: leatherworking

The fabric-centric post is here.

The reason I went to Sydney was to do a series of leatherworking classes at Birdsall Leather. I first heard about Birdsall at Gamma.Con in A.K. Wirru's Leathercrafting session. I had been looking for leatherworking classes for years so this was great news.

On Saturday I did the beginner class that covered stamping, stitching, dying and burnishing, as well as an overview of leather types. We each made a coaster to try the techniques. On Monday I had an all day private lesson to work on my Assassin’s Creed pieces. I kept working on these during the free work class on Tuesday.

First thing was to buy a hide. Everything except the glove and the pouches will be made out of 2.5mm vegetable tanned leather. I bought a 15ft hide which will be a bit more than I need but will mean I don’t have to go back to Sydney straight away if I mess something up. And of course there will always be new projects.

My large hide is represented by some pieces cut from it because it’s very unwieldy to move around.

I bought a 1.5mm hide for the pouches and a garment leather for the glove. Besides that, there are dyes, rivets and eyelets, cutting tools, and embossing tools. Turns out kitting out a completely new skillset is not cheap.

Not quite all the belts needed for two Assassins.

My private class involved cutting all the belts using a strap cutter – a fancy device that I didn't purchase. Then we went over embossing.

To prepare my designs prior to the classes; I "traced over" the promo image of Ezio using Gimp and a Wacom tablet.

Then my very kind mother converted them by hand to neat, usable swirls.

This is my first attempt at embossing. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I do need a bit more practice but having been a child who was incapable of colouring inside the lines it was better than I was expecting. I've tried a few different techniques in this sample – haven't yet decided which ones I will use on the final piece.

On the second day I started working on the belts and a bracer.

Leatherworking is a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to working on this project. The classes at Birdsall Leather were excellent. I'm now confident that I will be able to make everything I need.