More on Carving Leather

Carving a pattern onto your leather can be similar to the difference between the proverbial “silk purse and a sow’s ear.” Ranking the importance of the tools from one to ten with one being the highest, I would say that the swivel knife is the most important tool that you will have in your arsenal. A good piece of leather can look as if it had been run over by a semi-truck if the carving is not done well. I have talked with other leather craftsmen and they said the same thing.

Over the years, I have seen people take on a carving project that they were not skilled enough to complete. I did that myself when I first started out. In the first year that I worked with leather I did not have a good example of what good quality hand-tooled leather should look like and I put out some pretty “scabby looking” belts and wallets. I did my best as most people would do, but I did not take the time to practice carving like I should have and I made a lot of mistakes.

As for caring for your swivel knife, if it did not come in a box you will want to find one to put it in or make a pouch that you can slip it into for safe storage when you are not using it. Treat you swivel knife as if it is a precision surgical instrument and do not put other tools on top of it that will allow the blade to be damaged. If your swivel knife blade does happen to get damaged you will want to take the time to make sure that you re-sharpen it evenly. Trust me; doing it properly the first time will save you a lot of headaches and heartaches.

When carving a pattern onto the leather you will eventually notice that, the blade seems to have a lot of drag to it. Turn the swivel knife 180 degrees to switch edges and carve the pattern until the blade begins to drag again. At this point, you will want to “strop” or polish your blade. This is the process similar to what some barbers still do to get their straight razors ready to shave someone’s face. It is more like re-polishing the cutting surface of the blade than actually sharpening it. To sharpen your blade every time that it gets difficult to carve with will add a lot of extra time to your carving process. I will not say that you will wear out the blade more quickly, because, I still have the same swivel knife blade that came with it when I bought it over 40 years ago!

Stropping your swivel knife blade will make carving a whole lot easier as time goes along. I say that because using something like white jewelers rouge will actually help to smooth out some of the rough spots on your blade each time you strop it. It is amazing how much easier it is to take three or four minutes to strop a swivel knife blade and have an easier time of carving than it is to take out the honing oil and put it on the stone, drag the blade over the stone, wipe off the oil off the blade, turn the stone over and repeat the whole process all over again. When stropping your blade it is not necessary to remove the blade from the swivel knife barrel if you are careful to keep the edges flat as you strop it. This process can make a good quality-carving blade out of one that was rather rough ground in the beginning.

Getting the perfect surface on your blade will not happen with the first time that you strop it. It will need to be done many times, even midway of carving your pattern. It is not unusual for me to do this multiple times when I am carving a pattern. Keep in mind, white jeweler’s rouge is a very fine grit that is used to polish jewelry metals to a lustrous shine. I have a tool that I made many years ago for lifting the edges of flowers and leaves to give them a little more dimension. This tool was made from a concrete form snap-tie and the metal oxidizes occasionally making polishing necessary. When I finish the process, it looks as if it were made of a different kind of metal because of the shine.

If there was a contest that I had to judge between sharpening and stropping I would take stropping hands down. Stropping is less time consuming and carving is much easier with a smooth blade. Remember “peeling?” I found that I had more problems with peeling after I had gotten my swivel knife blade sharp after using the tonsorial gem. It may have been only me, but I would chalk it up to having the blade too sharp.

Now you read my speech about trying to carve or stamp your leather when it is too wet you will notice that trying to carve leather that is too dry will have a detrimental effect as well. The idea behind having the right amount of moisture in your leather is that the swivel knife blade will spread out the edges on each side of the cut more if it is moist than too dry. Carving the leather too dry will make the edges of the cut too round to get a good quality stamp. Instead of the carved lines having a good “V”, type of cut it will look more as if you cut it with a pocketknife. Remember, you can stamp your leather too wet or too dry if you want to do it. There are no police out there who are going to ticket you for not making sure that the leather is neither too wet nor too dry.

I cannot say enough about practicing with your swivel knife. Get some scrap leather that can be carved and stamped to use for practice. Take the time to try carving a piece that is bone dry and one that is completely soaked and compare those to a piece that has the correct moisture content. You should notice a great difference. I believe that you will want to make sure that you don’t start when the leather is too wet or allow it to get too dry.

Have fun!