Hand Stitched Leather Belt: A Beginners Leather Working Project
As a beginners leather working project, I decided to make a leather belt. To do the hand stitching I used the stitching pony that I made in the last video. This tool worked wonderfully and the resulting saddle stitched leather belt is real tough and good looking. Better than expected since my lack of leather crafting experience. Please join me on this leather working project and let me know what you think of the result!
Video transcript:
Hello there ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Tony Needs Hobbies. My name is Tony and today I will be doing my first leather working project ever. I will be making a leather belt. Have fun watching.
I start by rounding the end of the leather strap and sanding it so that it’s nice and smooth. Then I mark the positions where the holes need to go and punch them out. I repeat the hole punching process for the buckle. Then I scrape off some leather at the end of the strap so that it nicely folds around the buckle.
With some water and this wooden burnisher I polish the edges of the leather. It gives it a nice smooth appearance that you would normally only see on luxurious belts. And here I repeat all the steps of this process for the belt keeper.
The belt and the keeper are prepared for dying. I am going to use this dark brown dye because I like the color.
I pre-punched the first line of holes. Now I will add some contact cement to glue the leather together and then I will start stitching in the stitching pony that I made in last week’s video. I’m going to do a saddle stitch. It’s my first stitching project so it might be a bit sloppy but however it will result in some stitches.
What I really love about this belt is that the stitching went really well. It’s very regular, it just looks awesome! One thing that I’m not so happy about is that the dye dried out the leather a bit so it was very stiff after dyeing. I tried to fix this by applying some neatsfoot oil but leather still isn’t as flexible as I hoped it would be.
As my first real leather working project I made this leather belt using the stitching pony that I made in the last video. The belt isn’t perfect, I still have a lot to learn but I really love the way it turned out. Please let me know in the comments below what you think about the color combination and if you have any other leather working tips for me.
I will be doing more of these projects in the future so if you liked this video please subscribe to my channel and I will update you with those leather working projects. For now that’s it. I would like to thank you, bye bye!
