A mark of excellence?

It won't take long working with leather and you will realize that EVERYTHING can leave a mark on you leather. Sometimes they're tiny very light indentations,  sometimes they're massive "O,shit!" moments. I have  had plenty of the latter over the years and became fairly adept at correcting/repairing/hiding my mistakes.

First,  let's talk about avoiding some common things than can booger up your project.  At least I assume they're common since I seem to have committed all of these at one time or another. Some more recent than I care to admit...

1. Declutter your immediate work area. An often difficult task for a lot of creative types, so I'm just looking for you to clear the immediate area and not clean the whole house. Give yourself some elbow room and make sure you there's nothing that can get knocked over on your work piece.

2. Take off your watch and jewelery.  Your watch especially will tend to leave slight marks as you tool a piece of leather.

3. This is a big one... Trim your finger nails,  especially the pinkie of the hand you use to operate your swivel knife.  Ladies, if that's not an option you'll need to find an angle that your fingernail won't mark up the leather.

4. Careful how and where you store your hides. Especially after you've cased a piece of leather for a project.

5. No dyes, stains or other liquids on the tooling table. That includes your morning cup of Joe or your evening nightcap!

6. Moisture and metal are a major no no near your leather.  Except your tools, they're coated to protect the leather. Otherwise metal will cause a chemical reaction that will leave gray or black stains making an otherwise amazing piece of A grade Herman Oak look like it has VD. That said,  there's a technique that I'll cover another time that uses metal to dye your leather and make it look awesome.

Number 5 above reminded me of a time I was working on a piece at the fire station in my down time one evening.  We had a new dining table made for chow time. It couldn't have been more than 6 months old at the time.  I was finishing up what I was working on and knocked over a bottle of black dye! This was one of those "O, Shit!" moments I was talking about earlier, it really warranted a solid F-bomb. Not only did I ruin the leather I was working on, there was now about a 1ft diameter black circle on our custom made dining table!  I was sick to my stomach, as I wiped up the mess it just got worse. I was doing my best not to panic, but my best wasn't quite good enough.  I tried everything I could think of to clean the dye off of the table. (Rubbing alcohol seemed to work best by the way)  I finally had it watered down to a light grey blob. I ended up spending the rest of the night sanding through the clear coat until my bone headed mistake was no longer visible, then reapplied multiple coats of clear until all was well and the Chief was none the wiser. Until maybe someone shows him this blog entry,  in which case I might get a stern look. But that was 10 or more years ago,  so there's got to be some sort of statute of limitations on being a dumbass, right?

So, now that you've done what you can to avoid leaving unwanted marks on your project, let's think about what we can do to fix or minimize the inevitable booboo. You can work most marks out with a bone tool or a modeling spoon.

Here's a short video I did several months ago using a bone folder to remove marks,  the same can be done with a modeling tool or glass burnisher ...

Please be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts or ideas on removing marks from a project. 

LFFL,

Craig