Easy To Make Leather Valet Tray for Your Every Day Carry Items
This easy to make leather valet tray is a simple leatherworking project that can be made in under an hour. Since I didn’t have that much time lately, it easily fit in my schedule and is a lot of fun to make. This veg tan leather catchall can hold a lot of every day carry items, in my case a Victorinox Swiss army knife, a wallet, some keys and a watch. It’s a good and interesting project when you are just starting out leatherworking: you’ll learn to cut leather, punch holes and install snap buttons. The resulting product – a leather valet tray – is very useful in keeping your house organized. Have fun watching, and maybe making one of these EDC catchalls yourself!
Video transcript:
Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Tony Needs Hobbies. My name is Tony and in this video I am going to make a quick leatherworking project that instantly helps in organizing your house. Because in this video I am going to show how to make a valet tray. Have fun watching.
My leather of choice for this project is a 2 millimeters or 5 ounce thick piece of brown dyed veg tan leather. First step is deciding how big you want the tray to be. I want it to be 15 by 15 centimeters and 6 centimeters high, so I cut out a 27 by 27 centimeters piece of leather. That’s almost 11 by 11 inches.
Then it’s time to mark the locations for the hardware to go. I will put the snap buttons at 5 centimeters from each of the corners and 1.5 centimeters from the side. You might wonder why I don’t use rivets to secure the corners tightly. I will explain that later in this video.
On the marked locations I simply punch a hole using a hole punch that came with the buttons so I am sure that the size of the holes match the hardware to install.
Using any round object and an awl I mark how to round off the corner and then cut it out using a Stanley knife with a sharp blade. Cutting curved corners is difficult so I do this by cutting off small straight pieces to end up with a rounded corner.
And then install the snap button hardware in a mirrored fashion to be symmetrical. Close the buttons, and this valet tray is ready to fulfil its purpose.
Now why didn’t I use rivets. That’s simple. I want to give this piece of leather a dual purpose. Now I can simply open it up when I want to work on a watch for instance. The softer leather prevents the watch’s crystal to scratch. When done, just simply snap the buttons together and you can use it as a tray again.
This was a small and simple project but the result, this valet tray is really useful and I had a good deal of fun making it. In the next video I will bottle and taste some wine that I made about a year ago to celebrate the fact that this channel has reached 1000 subscribers. If you don’t want to miss that one, definitely consider subscribing to this channel. If you have enjoyed watching this video, then let me know by hitting the like button. That’s it for now, I’d like to thank you for watching. Bye, bye!
