New custom knife sheath with a "Tribal" Eagle hand tooled pattern. Belt or dangler mount. Fits up to a 1.5" wide blade with a blade+handle length greater than 9". Made from 9-10 oz vegetable tanned leather. Hand stitched and finished with an antique stain, acrylic top coat and hand buffed with beeswax. The Eagle pattern is a little hard to see in the finished form so I've shown a pic of the carving before finishing.
Very nice Eric! Very sharp lines. Do you trace the pattern out lightly with pencil and then tool it? Thanks for posting. Dan
Thanks and no I don't draw/trace directly on the leather. I have no drawing ability at all so my process is: Find a pattern I like and using my graphic program crop and size it as needed for the project and print on paper. Trace the pattern with a pencil on to opaque mylar (thin plastic with a surface you can write on). Case the leather with water and when it is ready for carving and trace the mylar pattern on to the leather using a fine tracing stylus. The thin mylar allows for a very clean line on the leather. The paper is to thick to trace through. Then cut the lines with a swivel knife. Then tool with leather bevel tools. And finally use hand modellers to finalize the shape and form of the lines. So those straight lines have been gone over 5 times before I'm finished which seems like a lot, but I like the results. From trace to finish, the pattern carving took about 4 hours for this sheath. Hope this answers your question.
That's a great description of the technique. I want to practice some fine patterns now. Thanks man! Dan
