The Importance of Finishing! - Leatherwork

You might notice that a lot of my pictures involve close up of edges and ends and what not... It's because I'm trying to show all those edges and ends with and without finishing techniques. They take forever, and some times they're a huge pain, but the end result is very much so worth it! Edit: Apparently writing all our finishing techniques is taking a long time too, so I'm splitting it up into different parts. Below are some of our Leather techniques!

When The Costume Guild headed out to our first con, Norwescon 34 in Seattle, WA, we brought our Dune costumes with the plans to dress up for the Saturday evening party. We decided on Friday night to enter the Costume contest instead. So we spent most of the day hanging out with other panicked costumers and some extremely over confident ones... And we learned about a little category called Workmanship. Workmanship is where they essentially look over your entire costume and look at all your techniques. Whether or not you're interested in entering a costume contest, we realized that a little extra workmanship goes a long long way. So I'm going to try and detail some of the techniques we've started using:



- Finishing your edges: When working on Perseus's Skirt, Dejathoris pointed out how much nicer the skirt edges would look if I took the bevel out and ran it along the edges.... Yes, yes indeed it looked better. But it was a pain in the @$$. So when you're taking on a bigger endeavor, you must take into consideration how to make your project look it's best, even if it takes you an extra 10-20 minutes it could mean the difference in your overall look!

- Sealing your Dyes: If you don't seal your dyes, prepare to get paint ALL OVER YOU. This is also the case with many types of spray paint on plastic but I will get to that in a moment. In leather shops like Tandy, you can get a sealant that's a paint or an aerosol spray. Each has a different kind of purpose and intent. I LOVE the spray for awkward angles and many of our projects like our Masks for NYE2011, but the paint was really good on finishing Perseus' (again). On NYE2011, Dejathoris made custom fit leather masques for herself and newly named Mr Dejathoris. To ensure that the dyes did not transfer to their faces, I believe she used the aerosol finishing spray. When we were painting/dying Perseus' leather, we actually used a stain rather than a dye. A dye would have resulted in too finished of a look, so we opted for a stain (more on that in the Perseus' post though). We then mixed some of the stain with the finish, because the finish alone ate away half our paint, resulting in it looking more "unfinished" rather than "worn". We liked the layered look, however we could have also opted for the aerosol to hold true to the look of the dye. 




- Rivets: "ARGH RIVETS" or a friendly frog sounding "Rivet" are two of the most common expressions around our working areas. Rivets can be really, really tough when they want to be, or easy as pie when you've finally figured it out. The key is figuring out how wide the leather/fabric/Wunderflex really is before guessing. Our most common problem was that we were trying to use rivets that were too big, therefore we'd end up with a half-dozen broken rivets and nothing to show for it! Also, this may sound silly, but make sure you're attaching your rivet in the right direction. Because prying off a rivet or a snap that's in the wrong direction is another massive, massive pain!