Tales from.. ..The StrapLab!

[TVvoodoo]

If you happen to be a rock fan, you'll know "Donington" is a rather large rock music festival held annually in Britain. Most any band worth their chugga-chugga,wheedly-wheedly salt has appeared there, and a wonderful good time is had by all. What you may NOT know is, Donington Park is also one of England's tip-top raceways. That's why I named this strap Donington... for the beautiful British Racing Green leather these straps are mostly made of.

The Well-Hung "Donington" is not a fancy strap - quite plain, actually. In fact, I don't even know why I've made this. Frankly, green straps tend to sell HORRIBLY in my Reverb store. But I figure just in the spirit of St. Paddy's I'd whip up a couple greenies. Not of kelly or shamrock green, but the richest, sexiest green I know of, that of a finely pedigreed English sport touring coupe. You'll get to enjoy all the hidey aroma, the beautiful contrast stitching, the luxurious feel of this leather, and imagine wind in your hair and a rather pointy female companion laughing gaily beside you in passenger seat, marveling at your double-shifting, and sharp cornering skills. And, luckily, because this is fully NOT a motorcar of any sort, you will avoid all of the demonically vexing electrical issues Limeys love to build into their automobiles. Brilliant!

Weekend is over blokes, but no grumpy Monday can stand up to a few pints of green beer!

 

[TVvoodoo]

"Sláinte" my friends, Hope all y'alls are having a grand St Paddy's!

Today off the bench a couple of fun ones. First, a throwback to the days when I was recycling leather jackets. Stumbled across this leather piece filed away in my "leather library" and decided to complete it for a change of pace. I've made a few of these over the years, they are super badass. Long too.

I call it "In The Pocket" as it incorporates the built-in pocket assembly from the original leather.

I use only the very best leather jackets for this one, meatier moto cowhide stuff, and of course a robust metal zipper is important too. Truth to tell, you're not gonna be able to jam a lot in there. A slide fits nice, could def add some picks, maybe a little rolled up something/something, and probably a good idea to stow a round of PPE in there, just in case, wink-wink, nudge-nudge. But that's about it. The zipper is lubed to run smooth, the leather is conditioned to look and feel black and beautiful.

Also new in the Well-Hung Reverb store is "Rager" some of that newer red leather hide I recently picked up, with a strip of bubbly metallic croc emboss up and down. Adds interest and texture. It's a little weird, but in a cool way I think. Most likely a one-off I'll never make again.

Both 3" wide, padded to be kind to your shoulder, with rolled edges that won't cut into your neck.
Today I just had an order for four direct from the store, from a busy pro, multiple repeat customer.
I'll spend most of the morning tomorrow putting together a nice package for him.

A great time for a TVvoodoo hangover prevention/cure that thankfully I haven't had to use for years now. Before you hit the sack, a vitamin B12, eat a piece of fruit, like an apple, then chew an antacid. First thing when you wake, drop an extra strength tylenol (whether you need it or not), guzzle a can of V8 and a glass of room temp. water. Give it a half hour, you're ready to take on all comers. Your bros might think you're Superman. Who doesn't want that?

 

[TVvoodoo]

Managed to complete three straps today, but only had enough time to list this first one... Cafe ZAP!

Picture doesn't really show it as well as I'd like, but it's red sparkle vinyl, exactly the kind covering the counter stools at your local retro cafe. Tough stuff, if a little plasticky. Has a charm of it's own. I stuck a bolt on it to juice it up a little. This is in now the store, with plenty more pix 3" wide, padded.

Also completed a new Wild Thing... "Black Leopard" which will show up in the shop tomorrow. This is black on black, the spots are raised in soft black velvet on heavier black fabric. Pretty cool. This one goes over 60" long. Also padded in the Well-Hung way.

lastly watch the store for the entrance of Regal Rumble, a new no Prisoners strap, actually a hybrid between my Dark Shadows, and No Prisoners. I dyed a strip up the middle of some snake embossed leaher, in a very deep purple, bursted the edges black then slapped this thrift store studded belt on top lined with tiny nickel studs.

Reads as mostly black really from a distance, but the deep purple peeks out nicely under the right lighting. This is also padded, 3" wide, goes as long as 59" padded like you've never experienced.
Hope your week is going well, happy Hump Day!

 

[ᛗᛜᛜᚺDᛜᎶ Ꮤᛨᚳᚴ]

Love the Alladin Sane of that lightning bolt! Maybe call it "Apaddin Sane" or "Alladin Same"!! The purple one is hot as well!!! Great stuff and thanks for sharing, I find it very entertaining to follow your creations and the processes of the same ;~))

 

[TVvoodoo]

New off the bench today, ridin' into the Well-Hung Reverb store is "Tombstone II!" Gang of three.

3" wide tweedy heavy upholstery fabric base, with strip of black dyed Sheridan embossed stitched. I then commenced to add a little bling to dress 'em up a bit. Black leather nose and tail assembly. go to 60" each one luxury padded and ready to be yer Huckleberry. Country style is never out of style. So says this ex ranch kid who's almost every decent shirt is still either denim, has snaps, or both!

 

[TVvoodoo]

Been a few weeks since I've tooled something. Got the bug again earlier this week while cruising social media. There was a young buck anguishing on how he dearly wanted to get into a cool old school hobby like leather tooling, but couldn't because all the tools were so damn expensive and so many were required.

An old-timer, (even older than me I think! LOL!) chimed in with a photo example of some work I though was really cool. Wasn't a guitar strap, but a piece much smaller, but that didn't matter. His reasoning behind the example he posted was that his art utilized simply ONE single leather stamp. Not only that, but one of the least expensive, most common ones available.

I thought his idea was super creative, execution wonderful. Since he put it out there, I'm borrowing, slightly modifying his idea for a tooled guitar strap application. I do have plenty of stamps though, though sometimes of course it seems never enough! Leather stamp GAS is real!

But just like with guitars, pedals and amps, sometimes too many choices blinds our creativity.

Before I began, I experimented with several types of the tool the old pro had, that I own. I finally chose this particular one giving the sharpest impressions. It's an older one that came to me in a kit my grandfather owned, all rolled up in oilcloth. In leatherworker lingo, it's called the "Camoflage" stamp. I have two others similar, one larger, one similar-sized but I suspect those came in an Asian kit I picked up on the cheap when I first started. Blurry, poorly defined impressions, and would you believe the metal shafts of those china tools often bend under hammering? If you get tools, try to get good ones!

The dude's pattern was basically large flowers about 3" across, starting from the centre, moving outward. The camoflage tool forms petals. I also used one other tool called a "seeder" for the centre of each flower. Here I am starting out, after a bit of practice on chunk of scrap leather.

I usually start on the back end of a leather strap like this, trying new a new thing, because invariably your work flows better as you get further towards the nose. You want your best to show up front. This ain't exciting work. In fact, it seemed the less I thought about it, the better it ended up looking. Perfect kind of task for the likes of me! The trickiest thinking was getting the centers spaced properly, then aligning how the flowers crowded together where the edges meet up.

I normally would do a stitch line before tooling, but I wanted the "art" to go right to the edge in this case. Took me about 1 hour 40 minutes of hammering to do a 46 inch main body, and a 17 inch tail strap. Arm was pretty sore by the end, as I hold it up pretty high, and I had a few mishits that bruised my hand pretty good. Particularly painful today, 'cause I was smacking that stamp pretty hard, wanting good deep impressions.

Very cool and rather simple texture... I call it "Bouquet."

Next up, a stitch line. This is maybe one of those expensive tools the noob was moaning about, but it's only about $16, and I picked up my first one only last year. Should have got it much earlier though. This tool bores a small channel out of the leather using the edge of your work as a guide. Once stitched, the thread sits down in this channel, being in there helps keep it from getting worn through. For years and years I used a rolling screen door channel tool to do this. This boring tool is much better. Takes a little practice to use it well, still have some trouble around corners.

Then, while the leather is still a bit damp from tooling I use an edge bevel, cuts nicer.

Note I used the stitch tool before the bevel as you want a nice sharp edge for your guide. This bevel tool rounds it off so it's easier to burnish later. Rounded edges won't dig into your neck. This tool takes a bit of power to drive it, but you also need to be VERY careful, 'cause if you slip, invariably it'll put a nightmarish gouge right into the nicest part of your painstaking tooling design. Mine's a bit duller than it should be. Need to attend to it.

All that done, I'm going to think about what colour to dye. I'd like it to be special. Normally I'd dye it while the leather was still wet, because it seems to take dye much more evenly, but I wanted to think about this one over the next couple days.

Happy Friday my forum bros. Hope your weekend hits the sweet spot.

 

[TVvoodoo]

Gotta say it was a learning weekend for me, a humbling one too

last we left, I had an undyed slab on the table. Over the weekend I dyed it yellow then then dabbed some orange around the perimeter. I was going for something sort of in the ballpark of this flower called a Zinnia but more yellow to orange than yellow to pinky red.

Doesn't much look the same at all now, does it? LOL !

Yes, s a real experiment into new territory, I've never seen before, absolutely not sure if my method was going to work out.

What my plan was, was to add a TON of contrast to the coloured petals, by LIGHTLY rubbing the standy-uppy parts of the leather with black dye, after I got colour down inside the petals. Well, for various reasons, it didn't work out much that way at all LOL!

A couple of problems.
1. to get darker black I had to rub it down four times, very lightly. Like a feather touch. Stressful! Still didnt get it as black/black as I was hoping.
And as you can see, the striations in each of the petals stick up too much, so they all got a bunch of dark on them too, this caught me by surprise. Probably should have more saturated colour in the petals to begin with too. Deeper yellow, deeper orange. But there's not enough meat on the inside of the ribs to show much colour.
2. The end of my rubber glove, the on the index finger, wasn't seated right down on my finger, so when I rubbed some black dye on,
so the glove smeared far more black than I wanted in some places kind of mucking things up. Rookie mistake. So you recover.
it all ended up a much darker piece than I was hoping, looking quite a bit different that I imagined it would. I toyed with just dyeing the whole thing black, and make the texture the star, but I'm stubborn and wanted to see what this looked like oiled and clearcoated, so I just kept going, dying the edges and stitch channel black, burnishing the edges and then continuing with the clearcoat regimen.

It's actually not at all horrible, but disappointing. I was hoping for much more colour to show through, as it is it mostly reads as black. I'll be padding and stitching it up and putting it in the store probably tomorrow. For the amount of errors, and variance from the original vision... it's still unique and rather of cool.

Sometimes, the dye and the leather does what IT wants to do, now what you want it to.

Well-Hung returning warrior has discovered a brand new use for WH straps!

View attachment 591607

Do not adapt your medical prescription without consulting a physician first!

 

[ᛗᛜᛜᚺDᛜᎶ Ꮤᛨᚳᚴ]

Gotta say it was a learning weekend for me, a humbling one too

last we left, I had an undyed slab on the table. Over the weekend I dyed it yellow then then dabbed some orange around the perimeter. I was going for something sort of in the ballpark of this flower called a Zinnia but more yellow to orange than yellow to pinky red.

Doesn't much look the same at all now, does it? LOL !

Yes, s a real experiment into new territory, I've never seen before, absolutely not sure if my method was going to work out.

What my plan was, was to add a TON of contrast to the coloured petals, by LIGHTLY rubbing the standy-uppy parts of the leather with black dye, after I got colour down inside the petals. Well, for various reasons, it didn't work out much that way at all LOL!

A couple of problems.
1. to get darker black I had to rub it down four times, very lightly. Like a feather touch. Stressful! Still didnt get it as black/black as I was hoping.
And as you can see, the striations in each of the petals stick up too much, so they all got a bunch of dark on them too, this caught me by surprise. Probably should have more saturated colour in the petals to begin with too. Deeper yellow, deeper orange. But there's not enough meat on the inside of the ribs to show much colour.
2. The end of my rubber glove, the on the index finger, wasn't seated right down on my finger, so when I rubbed some black dye on,
so the glove smeared far more black than I wanted in some places kind of mucking things up. Rookie mistake. So you recover.
it all ended up a much darker piece than I was hoping, looking quite a bit different that I imagined it would. I toyed with just dyeing the whole thing black, and make the texture the star, but I'm stubborn and wanted to see what this looked like oiled and clearcoated, so I just kept going, dying the edges and stitch channel black, burnishing the edges and then continuing with the clearcoat regimen.

It's actually not at all horrible, but disappointing. I was hoping for much more colour to show through, as it is it mostly reads as black. I'll be padding and stitching it up and putting it in the store probably tomorrow. For the amount of errors, and variance from the original vision... it's still unique and rather of cool.

Sometimes, the dye and the leather does what IT wants to do, now what you want it to.

Well-Hung returning warrior has discovered a brand new use for WH straps!

View attachment 591607

Do not adapt your medical prescription without consulting a physician first!

It actually has a kind of metallic look to it in the end! I think it is pretty cool!! Plus, you have learned and can now lean into this design with some knowledge of what works and what does not!!! Win win ;~))