Recently I started in on working a leather cuff for a friend. He’s been wanting one for a while and I finally had time to get it done for him. I opted to try using the program formally known as Vectornator to create the pattern, which is my approximation of several different videos with verious version of this concept.
I started out making a template to follow and trial and error. In this case there was more error…but not for the reason you might be thinking.
I was 99% done, in fact, I was getting ready to do the final step, when my friend send me a message saying the measurement he had sent before was incorrect. As you can see, in the picture above the new one is significantly smaller.
Once I used traditional methods for cutting out the now second cuff, I then went ahead and cleaned up my edges, I used a burnishing tool and was able to get most of the edges, except for the corners. I ran down to the lathe and made what I now refer to as… little burny
I loaded my pattern in, and scored the leather as light as possible so it would only be a guide for my tooling and not a large stand out mark.
Fortunately I had the day off during this, and with nothing to do, I ended up spending a few hours soly working on this project, and getting all my tooling done in about 2-3 hours I dyed the edges and then used a leather dye pen to color the knotwork to make it stand out from the tan dye.
From there it was a simple sprint to the end! Put finishing coat on my leather, cut a piece for a nice smooth under bottom, and then finish those edges and sitch the bottom on.
Over all im happy with how it went, I may attempt to get the templates into the catalog at some point, let me know if this is something you’d make if you got this far!
Till next time
-Hock
