Sewing leather revisited - Making a sheath for my Frost Mora carving knife

Historical Note: I'm not sure who made the knife sheathes. There's no 'Scabbard Company' on the livery rolls in the 16th century. Possibly the Worshipful Company of Girdlers or they were a sub-group of the Leathersellers, who handled most of the miscellaneous leathergoods that made up Elizabethan life. It might even be the Cutlers, who were responsible for all the other bits and bobs associated with knives. Any way you cut it, there were a lot of knives in Elizabethan England. Every knife needs a sheath and mine are no different.

Looking at the projects that have been collecting dust, I think the shoes are probably the most annoying thing to have lingering overlong in the workshop. For one thing, the leather and lasts and tools take up a lot of room and for another, I just really need to get them done because I need a new pair of shoes. (Also, I hate leaving things half-finished.)

Unfortunately, while I haven't been completely idle since I parked this project in the driveway awhile back, I also haven't been doing any leatherworking. Cordwaining involves some pretty heavily-developed leatherworking skills, especially sewing, so I need to practice.

You might recall the costrel project, which is a study in heavy-construction sewing techniques. I also need a practice project that uses some of the more subtle stitches and techniques for closing the uppers of my new shoes.

As it happens, my preferred style of knife sheath uses the round stitch to close the seam up the back. And since that's a fiddly piece of business to learn and I'm in need of practice, methinks I hear a knife calling for a new leather home.

My favorite woodcarving knife has to be this Swedish blade made by Morakniv simply called "The Woodcarving 106". They sell on Amazon for about $25.00, which is a pretty good price for a knife you won't want to put down.

It's a strong little workhorse and can hold an edge like nobody's business. You couldn't ask more from a knife.

The problem: they come with a crappy plastic sheath. And that just sucks on a deeply aesthetic level.

The solution: make a new one, of course.

Parts List:

• A knife
• 2 poplar scraps slightly larger than the knife blade
• Shaping tools for wood (knives, spokeshaves, rasps, files, sandpaper... etc.)
• A piece of vegetable tanned leather large enough to wrap around the knife
• To make the pattern: See this post about patternmaking
• Wood glue
• Quality, long-staple linen thread
• Two large-eye long darning needles (or boar bristles if you can get them)
• beeswax
• sticky wax (if you have boar bristles to use)
• Stitch marking wheel or ruler
• curved awl 

A truly razor-sharp knife will eventually cut its way out of any all-leather sheath or die trying. If you make a standard sheath by sandwiching the blade between two pieces of leather as we used to do in Boy Scouts, the knife has an even easier time of it because it can just slice the stitches. Some leatherworkers use rivets instead of stitches and that's fine, but hardly traditional.

First, some woodworking...

I prefer wood cores (of course), so step one is to make a wooden house for the blade of the knife. I used a bit of poplar I had lying around, but any hardwood will do. We're going to use two pieces with a knife-shaped void between them to house the blade.

Cut two pieces of wood, slightly larger than your knife blade. Trace around the blade of the knife on one side of each piece of wood.

Use chisels and a router plane to remove the waste from one side (and one side only) leaving a void where your knife sits flush with the wood, like so.

 It doesn't have to be beautiful, but it needs to fit.

Why did I carve only one side of the sandwich? Because in any joinery project, it's unwise to leave a wedge (like a knife blade) sitting against a seam. You're just asking to get that seam split apart.

Glue your sandwich together using the glue of your choice and clamp it gently while it dries (or use rubber bands as I have done). 

You can use hide glue for the period touch. For knife sheaths, though, I prefer Tightbond III because it's waterproof and I'm more concerned about rust than turning out a period-perfect piece. This isn't really a reproduction of a period piece anyway, though the techniques are sound and were used during our time frame in this capacity.

Note that my pieces are rather thick. Partly that's because I'm using a scrap and partly it's because I wanted lots of room to maneuver when I got around to shaping the glued-up piece. 

Let it sit overnight to cure.

Make sure the knife sits securely in the void you carved out and then use spokeshaves, chisels, rasps, and handplanes to cut it down to the bare minimum of wood. I left roughly 1/8 inch of wood on every side of the knife blade.

Seal the wood. You can use an oil finishes for a period-appropriate sheath, or you can cheat and use polyurethane like I did. The next part of the process will expose this wood core to the damp and my woodworking often takes place out of doors in less-than-ideal conditions. It's your choice. 

Insert the knife into the wood sheath and wrap it in paper and masking tape as we did when making the pattern for the shoes last year. Note that the sheath goes about halfway up the hilt of the knife. That's on purpose. It helps protect the knife and will keep it from slipping out of the sheath quite so easily.

There's only one seam, up the back, and the edges should just meet. For more information on this style of patterning, see this post here: Wrapping Peasants - Pattern Drafting Part I and this post here: Drafting patterns for leatherworking.

Note #1: Remember to decide how you're going to attach it to your belt before you get to the cutting leather stage.

Note #2: If you want to incise, tool, or otherwise decorate your leather, do so before you begin sewing. I admit that I have at least once forgotten to do that. For tools like this one, I like mine a bit plain.

This is where we begin practicing our cordwaining in the guise of sheathmaking...

Boar Bristles and Closing Awls

Waxed Ends (skip if you don't have boar bristles/just want to use needles)

I'm going to sew this up using boar bristles instead of needles. This is the period-appropriate method of work for shoemakers and bookbinders. The sharp, flexible bristles are attached to the end using sticky wax and cleverness. I'm rubbish at it and need lots of practice, but Francis Classe is great at it and provided us with a great tutorial on how to go about it.  I do a lot of reinventing the wheel on this project, but I can't best Francis at something that he taught me, so if you want to go the bristle route, you should follow that link and learn to do it right.

Some modern shoemakers have good luck using heavy-test fishing line in lieu of the boar's bristle. If you don't have access to a boar or its bristles, there are those who swear by it. I've never tried it, though, so I trust your Google-fu to let you figure it out. I tried to find a link to a tutorial I could share but only found references to a dead site.

Your mileage may vary.

Why boar bristles and fishing line?

We're going to perform something called the "round stitch" which follows a curved path through the leather. In order to pull that off, you use a curved awl to create a tunnel through the leather from the top to the edge. Then, you need to be able to push your 'needle' through that tunnel. 

You can do this with long, slightly flexible needles like long darners and I've had decent luck doing so in the past, but a piece of sharp, flexible, keratin like a boar bristle or a similarly flexy bit of fishing line are a godsend and speed things up.

I'll get more into the boar bristles and waxed ends when we tackle the actual shoes. This is really just a test run...

Curved awls

The two outside awls are the same as in the previous photo. They are made from antiques, which I bought from the extra stash of a cordwainer friend of mine. You don't have to haunt antique stores and bug your shoemaking buddies for their tools, though. These closing awls are still sold new by some specialty retailers, or you can get by with that middle awl with the knurled piece for changing the blades. It was purchased new from Tandy Leather, just last year. Just make sure the cross-section is oval rather than round to prevent tearout.

Closing: The Round Stitch

Use your marking wheel (or a ruler, dividers, etcetera) to mark an even stitch distance all around the edge of your seam on both sides, 1/4 - 1/8 of an inch back from the edge. 

Make sure that the marks on each side a exactly parallel to one another.

My depth is wandering quite a bit here. You can see why I feel like I need the practice.

Use your curved awl to create a hole that angles from the mark made by your stitch marker curving toward and out the edge of the leather. The depth should be just a bit deeper than half the leather's thickness. THIS TAKES A BIT OF PRACTICE. I'd advise using some scraps to practice.

Too deep and your seam will pucker. Too shallow and you'll tear out.

Al Muckart -- a reenactor and craftsman who writes the Where Are the Elves? shoemaking blog -- created a tutorial that illustrates quite well how to do this. I've linked to it in the footnotes at the bottom of the post.

Wet the leather in warm water to make it a bit stretchy. You don't want to soak it too long or to use boiling water. This is not "cuirboulli", which would be too stiff for this particular purpose. Just hot tap water is fine and don't soak it for too long. (You just want it pliable and a bit stretchy, but don't want to leach all the collagen out of the leather.)

Roll the leather between towels to get the excess water out and then wrap it around your wooden core with the knife still in the sheath. Oil the blade and seal the wood and you should be fine for the amount of moisture we're talking about, but now you know why I sealed my wood. (Some sheath makers wrap the knife in plastic wrap, which isn't a bad idea.)

Either create your waxed ends or thread two flexible needles on either end of a piece of strong hemp or linen thread. I stipulated "long staple" which refers to the length of the fibers that were spun to create the thread. The longer the staple length, the stronger and more durable the resulting thread.

Working from both sides at once, sew back and forth across the gap. Note: people who make puppets and stuffed animals refer to as a "ladder stitch" while other leatherworkers may call it a "butt stitch". Shoemakers call it a round stitch, so we're going with that from now on.

The rest is stitching and letting the leather dry.

That open end is on purpose. It's traditional for to leave that little curled fishtail on Scandinavian knife sheathes.  I'm not sure if there's a practical purpose to it other than making the sewing easier because you don't have to ease the pattern around the point. It will be cut back a bit when I'm finished.

A lot of Nordic fishermen settled along the coast in Washington state, and I've seen antique fileting knives that have sheathes like this where the tip was cut to a little fishtail shape.  I'll just be slicing mine off at a pleasing (to me) angle.

Yes, that's blood on that bit of tissue you see above. Remember to respect sharp tools. And remember that the sharper the tool, the less damage it does when it does cut you. 

Now we just have to let the leather dry, then dye it to our desired color and finish it with a bit of wax and polish.

Further Reading:

1. Cordwhatnow? A layman's guide to shoemaking tools & terms School of the Renaissance Artisan, posted January, 2014
2. Basic Techniques of Construction (Including waxed ends and how to use them)
   by Francis Classe at his Raised Heels cordwaining blog
3. The Round Closing Seam in Shoemaking (PDF)
   by Al Muckart of the Where Are the Elves shoemaking blog

Drafting patterns for leatherworking

Note: This post isn't really about 16th century methodologies.

I've shared a few of my favorite "hacks" (as the kids say) for making leather items with a bit of improvisation in the tools department. We've used flower pots to build mugs, we've used butter knives for skiving, and my favorite cheap woodworking chisels for cutting.

So let's talk about pattern making.

If you've ever followed my maskmaking tutorial or done any other leatherworking without a pre-printed pattern, you've noticed that there's often a size discrepancy between any paper pattern you've created by wrapping the item in paper and marking seams (as we did with this shoemaking post) and the leather you're going to use.

This can cause some real fit issues.

The problem stems from the difference in thickness between paper and leather, combined with the fact that paper doesn't stretch around a form and leather does. You could use some math to account for the thickness, but the stretch is a bit more difficult to guess at, which can result in some wasted materials.

Here's my Not Even Remotely Period (NERP) approach to leather patterning that saves me a lot of time and leather when I'm winging it with a pattern: craft foam.

In the image below, I am preparing a knife sheath for one of my carving knives. I've wrapped the knife in paper and marked the seam, but to get a better handle on the actual shape of the final piece of leather, I made the pattern in the back on thin white foam which I purchased from a local Michael's craft store.

It's not quite as thick as the final leather, but it's close. More importantly, it stretches a bit in a manner that is very reminiscent of damp leather. And since this is a pattern where the fit is precise and the seams have to just meet with no seam allowance, fit is so very crucial.

It's NERPy, sure, but it works a treat.

- Scott

Continuing on with Costrels, Cordwaining, and 6th Grade Leatherworking Lessons...

Welcome back. Where was I? My workbench is such a mess right now...

Oh, yes... cordwaining. We were making shoes, weren't we? 

When we left off, I was getting started on a pair of shoes to cover those wooden lasts you can see on my bench in the photo above. Unfortunately, it took about ten seconds of testing my hand on the short list of necessary stitches provided to me by Francis and the site of Marc Carlson, before I remembered how out of practice I am and just how long ago it was that I learned all this stuff.

When I was in sixth grade, back in Missouri, I was enrolled in a class called "Industrial Arts" where we learned to work with wood, plastic, and leather. It was fun and it taught me nothing that would be useful in any industry practiced anywhere in that postal code, even in the 1980's. But it did put me on the path that led straight to this project.

Flash forward to a new century, and I started going into more three-dimensional leather sculpting, making Commedia dell'arte masks. As I believe I've mentioned before, those masks are complex and challenging and fun to make , but I didn't fully appreciate how much they are just an entry-level project compared to proper shoemaking.

Cordwaining might well be the most advanced class of leatherworking I ever attempt. I was ready for shaping leather, but not for the sewing. There's not much sewing in the masking trade.

To prepare properly, I'm going to make two projects that are neither mask nor shoe, but which will allow me to practice key aspects (read: sewing) of the craft that are specifically relevant to the cordwainer.

The first project will be a costrel, which is a water vessel and a step back into the guild of horners and leather bottellers. Last time, we made a jack with a flowerpot, but this time we're essentially going to make a leather barrel for holding water.

When it's done, it will look something like this.

But we have a few steps we have to take to get there, and at least one cool cordwaining tool to make in the interim.

More tomorrow.

~ Scott

A Beginner's Guide to Girdles: Basic Leatherworking

Yale Center for British Art,
Paul Mellon Collection

I've been to many renaissance faires and acted in quite a few, so I don't walk around with a clipboard, taking note of the inaccuracies. That would be boring and boorish. Nonetheless, I think the one I find the most vexing for me (because it would be the easiest one to fix) has to be the Big Errol Flynn Pirate Belts I see walking around with people attached to them.

Belts in the 16th century just were not that wide. And the buckles are almost always all wrong to boot. I look at a lot of old artwork, delving into the sketchbooks of the artists when they're available, and nowhere do I see those big belts. And the metal-detector finds back me up on this one. The buckles we find just simply aren't that big. On average, buckles of the period seem made to fit a 1/2 - 3/4 inch strap.

I can't help noticing these things. It's a curse.

It's important to note that in this time period, belts weren't for holding your pants up. That's a relatively recent development, actually. Belts were there to hold your knife, sword, and/or purse and not much else.  (The "I have everything I own tied to my belt" thing at renaissance faires also bugs the crap out of me, but I digress.) In the 16th century, your pants were tied either to the waistcoat or doublet with cords, called "points". In order to take your pants down, you had to take off your doublet or untie your points. 

And before you ask: Yes, methods for disrobing and going to the bathroom are a common topic of conversation for male reenactors.

A properly-sized belt worn above a row of bows where the man's lower garments are joined to his upper garments.

Take a good look at Robert Dudley at the top of this post. He was Queen Elizabeth's favorite throughout most of his life. The very image of mid-reign manliness at the height of Elizabethan fashion. See his sword belt? It's maybe 3/4 inch wide at best. Probably less.

I only bring this up because it's a pet peeve (and you thought I only had pet cats) and because when we do these projects, it's important that we're replicating items as they actually were, not as Hollywood (and your local renaissance faire) depicts them.

Of Buckles & Leather

The straps I use are generally 5/8 inch. Even this might be a bit wide. These original Tudor buckles from metal detector finds that are being made available for sale from UK website Crossman Crafts are affixed to 12 mm (1/2 inch) straps: http://www.crossmancrafts.co.uk/salvage/  

Yes those are real Tudor artifacts. Buckles are so abundant in the finds and so often made of base metals that they're rarely rated as "treasure" in the legal sense, so they can be and often are sold and exported. Aside from the obvious auction sites you can buy original pieces several places online. I like Crossman mostly because the site owner is a craftsman after my own heart and quite generous with his advice to other craftspeople. There's also Gaukler Medieval, which offers a small and ever-changing trove of original items, including artifacts of various periods: http://medievalwares.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=65&zenid=2mo9kdrnt8333hk2una5ghv6p1

Of course you can't ever really own a piece of history, but you sure can rent one for awhile.

Note that the real buckles don't look like most of the ones you see at the stores or in movies. The most prevalent in our period are what's known as a 'spectacle' buckle. Meaning they look like a wee pair of glasses. They were made by casting in bronze and brass and/or various precious metals as suited the man or woman that ordered it.

At some point, we have to do some casting. The Goldsmiths, Pewterers and Founders companies lie ahead, of course, and that's what the soapstone in this picture is destined for. Casting projects will likely include buckles because they're an item that one always seems to need, as well as buttons and maybe some silly oddments like pilgrim's badges.

All that lies ahead of us, though, because the Girdler would have probably bought them or had them made special to his specifications by someone from one of those other specialties, then assembled them in his shop. If nothing else, the simple brass ones we're working with here wouldn't have been made much fuss over because they were for the more common folk such as your this humble craftsman whose hands you see here.

I think that I have a burr about belts because they're a very simple project. My first ever leather working project was a belt. I think I was ten. Even before that, my exposure to leatherworking was mostly limited to my dad or grandpa punching extra holes in my belt to keep my blue jeans from slipping over my scrawny hips.

The Girdler's company did more than make average leather belts like these. They made fine girdles for ladies and sword belts for gentlemen. This sort of thing would be relegated to an apprentice, I should think. All the same, it's an important piece of kit.

For a simple, leather belt, there's only two pieces: A belt and a buckle.

It goes like this: 

1. Order your buckle and cut an appropriately-sized strap or buy one at a leather working supplier like I usually do. Unless you buy your leather wholesale, the savings of cutting your own straps just doesn't pan out like you'd think it should.
2. Cut a slot near one end of your strap to accommodate the tongue of the buckle. Leave an inch or two of leather at the end to wrap back and sew.
3. The buckle slips on, with the tongue passing through the slot and given enough room to travel by adjusting the length of your slot. You might have to fiddle with it a bit. 
4. Sew the buckle in place. I like sewing a little triangle as you can see, but there are plenty of other methods.

NOTE: Don't use pop rivets. They're convenient and I confess to having used them a lot before I learned better. Pop rivets are never really necessary and never look quite right. If you want rivets, go to your local hardware store and buy some proper ones and learn how to peen them properly.  

Honestly, sewing is much easier. Just punch the holes ahead of time and wax your thread like we did with the leather jack we made the other day.

Now, you might be saying "This article is incomplete" and you would be correct. The simple leather belt was the least of the Girdler's wares. Sword belts and fancy adornments for Milady's waist were the heights of their trade, but we're working on the lives of the commonfolk here at the School of the Renaissance Artisan.

Not that I wouldn't like to see input from some of the great craftspeople I know who specialize in those other areas.

Much like the pins we began this journey contemplating, what this simple leather belt gives us is a jumping off point for further explorations into the craft of those who cast the bronze and brass buckles, the craftspeople who tanned and sold the hides, and so on. This humble belt, assembled by a Girdler's apprentice, sits at the end of a long chain of suppliers, all of whom stand between us and the culmination of this project come December.

For the moment, though, revel in your perfectly period Elizabethan leather belt to gird you against a chaotic world.

~ Scott

Leatherworking with Flowerpots

The stave tankard has reached a point of endless tinkering to get it juuuuusssst right for it to hold water. At this point, it's still mostly a lovingly handmade oak colander. There's definitely a reason people devoted their lives to mastering this craft.

I'll post updates as I progress, or if I throw in the towel. Let's move on to other ways to get beer from the tap to the table.

One of the first research adventures I embarked upon as I started thinking about this project was chasing down the makers of all those leather bottels, jugs, and jacks that you see in the museums and hanging from the belts of people at renaissance faires. I was curious because I've been a leatherworker all my life and I wanted to chase down the authenticity of some of the pieces you see most often.

I was a bit surprised to discover that the advent of glass and ceramics had driven the leather bottellers into the arms of the Horner's Company in 1467. So we're going to explore both leather and horn with this project.

Honestly, the alliance makes perfect sense. Horn and leather were the plastics of the early modern world. The methods used to form both horn and leather are very similar. The material is soaked until it becomes pliable and then formed over a matrix, which was usually made of wood. For leather, we use hot water to soften the collagen and for Horn, a weak base solution such as ammonia (probably distilled from urine).

We're going to start with leather because it's where I'm already most comfortable. This one will go by pretty quickly because I'm in my element.

A wet leather Commedia del Arte mask mounted over 

a handcarved wooden matrix.

I've written a lot about making leather goods, mostly commedia dell arte masks, but I've never made any household goods like drinking vessels. Most of the drinking vessels used by the common folk of London right up until the 18th century were leather. Mugs, bombards, costrels, these things are often found in shipwrecks and in the void spaces of old buildings in Europe.

Because I haven't done a drinking vessel before, I'm not going to start big. The logical place to start would be something small, like a tankard. So that's what I'm going to do. The thing is, without a lathe to my name (we'll get to wood turning later in the year) it would take a lot of effort to put together a nice round matrix for a mug that's just a learning piece.

So to the Goodwill I go.

I was looking for something that was beaker-shaped and found this flowerpot. So we're going to go with it because - to be honest - it doesn't matter what you form it over. Most leather commedia masks these days are made on concrete matrices. I'm the only maskmaker I know who still uses wood.

The shape of the final leather piece is the important thing here. If you want to do this yourself, I'd advise that you go to this blog post I wrote awhile back about preparing the leather and then this one about wet-forming that leather.

The upshot is this:

1. Wrap some paper around your matrix to get a pattern and then cut your leather. Use vegetable tanned leather.
2. Soak your leather in hot water from the tap. Hot enough to say "Yeow! That's hot!" but not hot enough to burn you. Leather is skin and if it will damage you, it will damage the leather. You're reactivating the collagen in the leather, but you don't want to extract it and dry out the leather.
3. Find or cut a round plug that is the size of the inside circumference and do the same thing with the leather wrapped over it.
4. Wrap the leather around your form and secure it in place then set it aside to dry.

For the record, those cable ties will leave marks on the leather but I'm okay with that. In this case, the incised marks will be decorative.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this mug first (and why I don't care about the matrix material) is because I wanted to practice the stitches I'll need to make a bombard or a costrel. 

One of the keys to the tight, water-proof seams is the double rows of stitching that are offset as you can see in the picture below. 

There's a lot of information out there about boiling the leather in wax or whathaveyou. I've heard it works, but didn't try it this time. This one will be lined with either brewer's pitch or a similar food-safe resin because I want to use it and not get sick. 

But really, it's just nice to make a mug that doesn't leak all over the daggum workbench.

Read more in the book Black Jacks and Leather Bottells by Oliver Baker

~Scott