Making a leather pocket, part II and last

Stitching on the bottom panel went faster than I expected, and by Noon yesterday I was able to get to work on the final steps.

The original had, as far as I can guess from the photos, eight slits on each side for the drawstring.  I spaced my markings out 7/8 inch (22mm) apart and wound up with nine on each side.  However, this was a miscalculation; since the drawstring should start and finish on the outside, the final pair went unused.  I made the slits with a fresh pointed X-Acto blade, pushed through against a wood "working" block.  Older blades tend to break at the very tip, leaving the point squared-off - even if the squaring is so tiny that it looks pointed, it's not as good at piercing.  Working by eye, I made each slit around 5/8 inch (16mm) tall and spaced 5/8 inch from the top edge.  After penciling a guideline on the rough side, but otherwise working freehand, I added the decorative piercings below the drawstring slits with a hobby awl.  They weren't very visible, so I enlarged them with a thicker round scratch awl.

The final touch is a drawstring, in the form of a German buckskin thong from Crazy Crow, of which I have several, so I selected the thickest (some of them seem much too thin for this purpose).  It may be better to replace it with something less stretchy later.  A wool or soft linen/hemp string about a quarter-inch thick might work well here, though I might worry that they would wear at the chamois.  The German buckskin has the same texture and softness as the chamois, so my guess is they should wear at each other at about the same rate.

Making a leather pocket, part I

About a year ago, I discussed a leather drawstring pocket found at Elephantine, Egypt, and compared it to a readymade bag from Crazy Crow that I thought would make a passable substitute.  I felt at the time that it wouldn't be difficult to make a more authentic replica, and since I have a few spare days, it seemed like now was the moment to go ahead with that.

Based on the dimensions of the Crazy Crow bag, a replica should be a hair larger to accommodate things that you wouldn't want to leave unattended, including a phone, passport, wallet and spare cash.  I turned the readymade bag inside-out and measured its full height at 6.25 inches (17.22cm) and width at 4.75 inches (12.06cm), and increased them to 7 and 5 inches (17.78 and 12.7cm).  Admittedly, this effort is a little undone by the fact that I'm leaving a wider seam of almost 1/4 inch (0.63cm) due to my leather being so thin.  By my calculations, a bag with a 5-inch bottom panel should have a circumference (and thus length of the walls) of 15.71 inches (39.9cm); however, it might've been a good idea to leave about an inch extra to account for all the seams.  We'll see what happens.

The material is chamois from Ace Hardware.  Although named after a wild goat from Europe, American chamois is made from sheepskin, double-sueded and tanned with fish oil in the same manner as true buff (cowhide) and German buckskin.  As noted before, this process is an approximate substitute for the classic braintanning and similar fat-cured leathers of antiquity, differing only in the fact that leathers tanned with fish oil require no smoking, and thus are paler and smell different.

Normally I would suggest feeling all the pieces of chamois and selecting the heaviest one.  However, Ace has now begun to package their chamois in plastic bags, so it was no longer possible to confidently make a selection by touch.  To make the most of the material I got, I laid out the lines around the middle, where the hide is thickest.  It seems to me just barely thick enough for this purpose.  The leftovers can be used for facing small knife sheaths, adding sand gussets to chukkas, and other light-duty uses.

The only compass I currently have isn't sized to hold a normal writing pen, so I just scraped the pencil lightly against the suede and then tried to re-draw it freeform.  As usual, the lines are drawn on the rougher side, though it bears mentioning that the difference in texture between the two sides of a double-sueded fat-cured leather is, in my experience, much less than that between the two sides of most chrome-tanned splits (which tend to have a nice suede side and an ugly, stringy one).

 

Also as usual, stitching is done inside-out, with the rougher side and its ink lines turned inward when done.  Chamois is thin enough to push the needle through without pre-piercing holes.  The original bag had a rand on only one side seam.  I started with the simpler seam, stitching with buttonweight linen thread (not multi-ply cord this time) and re-waxing as I went with a blob of Victory Brown wax that I have on hand - it's softer than beeswax, so it's easier to use for this purpose.  The original pocket apparently had a single running stitch, so I knotted the thread at both ends of the seams.

The next step, sewing the bottom seam while inserting the rand on a curve, will probably be the most difficult.  I'll work on it today and probably tomorrow as well.

Cold-dyeing with madder root, part III and last

On July 3 I put the chamois in the dyebath with several rocks to keep it all underwater.  After just over a day, it was already showing heavy, but uneven, staining.

I took it out, swished it around and rearranged it every day for the next four days, toward the end of which it seemed not to be taking on any more color.  After that, fears that it may have eventually started to putrefy drove me to take it out.  The initial plan was to let it dry, rinse out any unfixed dye and bits of madder root, and put it back in the bath if the color wasn't satisfactory.

The chamois after drying but before rinsing.

I rinsed in about half a dozen laundry room sinkfuls of cold water without soap or detergent (per the advice of RAT members).  After several rinses, the color of the water began to redden less, but lots of leather fibers started slipping.

Both after the initial dyebath and after the rinsing, I pressed as much water as I could out of the leather, then draped it over a box fan on low to dry, kneading and rearranging it every half hour to keep it soft.

The finished chamois is noticeably lighter and duller than before rinsing, though not quite as bad as it looks here (it actually has a bit more yellow than you see).  Interestingly it seems that most of the slipped fibers during the rinse came from the shaggier side, which I take to be the flesh side.  It's now much smoother and more washed-out in color than the shorter-napped side pictured above.

So, success?  Well, for a given measure.  The leather is certainly red.  It's just not as rich or as even in color as we've come to expect.  For all I know, this could just be what madder-red leather looked like in ancient times, but maybe there are factors that would result in a better color, such as larger vats or more frequent stirring.

One last note:  The plastic bucket I used was also stained.  I wonder, if I use it for future dyeing projects with other colors, will they pick up some pink from this one?

Cold-dyeing leather with madder root, part II

After soaking the chamois in mordant solution for 24 hours, I drained it, pressed it, and spread it out to dry in the sun today.  It'll remain dry until the dyebath is ready to use.

I'm a little concerned about what the soak might have done to it, since the water had turned faintly chamois-colored.  Did the alum and/or the cream of tartar attack the aldehydes, liberating some of the fish oil?  I'll have to knead it once it's dry and see whether it's turned rawhide-ish.

Yesterday meanwhiles, I started getting the dyebath ready to use.  I'm using the recipe and numbers from Wild Colours.  Luckily I had a manygallon bucket on hand as well as a jar of calcium carbonate I bought for use as a white paint pigment last year.

Although the numbers call for using a 1:1 ratio of madder to fiber by weight, I used the entire 100 grams of madder for 71 grams of leather because I can't be bothered and what am I going to do with 29 grams of madder anyway?

I put the powder in the bucket, poured eight quarts of water over it, sprinkled on the calcium and stirred it all up with my hand in a rubber glove.  Then I covered it in Saran wrap and set it on the back porch, with another plastic bag tautly pulled over the top of the bucket to prevent rain from filling it up.  (In hindsight, another sheet of plastic wrap would probably work better for this purpose.)  It will sit for four days to a week and then the leather will soak in it for four days to a week.  So, next update in about two weeks.

Cold-dyeing leather with madder root, part I

I plan on an all-new akinakes and scabbard for Plataea 2021.  My previous designs have used acrylic paints on the leather scabbard or leather facing.  Since I'm hoping to eliminate as much non-period materials as possible this time around, and I never figured out how to make a water-resistant paint for leather, my current aim is just to use a dyed red leather facing and maybe a bronze applique.

The trouble with dyeing leather is that the equivalent processes for fabric usually involve simmering them in water with mordants and dyes, but simmering leather invariably causes it to shrink and harden.  To work around that, I'm attempting both the mordanting and dyeing processes "cold" (which is to say, not hot enough to cause the leather's collagen protein fibers to coil up, which is what causes shrinkage and hardening).

Cold-mordanting is not unheard-of, as Sea Green and Sapphire describes.  Heat merely speeds up the process, but if you leave the fiber to soak overnight, you really only need enough heat to dissolve the mordants.  For me, all this is theoretical, and Heidi is speaking of wool, not leather, so we'll see whether it holds true in my situation.  It's my understanding that mordants for wool will work on leather, since both are proteins.

I'm using aluminum sulfate, which providence caused me to buy a pound of back when Allegheny Art was still operating in my town.  I have most of that left.  Ancient Mesopotamian records often mention alum and madder in association with leather, so we know this is a period-appropriate method.  Cream of tartar is, of course, readily available in grocery stores, and people should have at least been familiar with it in the Achaemenid period, since it readily precipitates out of fermenting grape wine.  Admittedly I don't know whether it was used to assist in mordanting at that time, but I'm willing to admit it as a plausibility.

The chamois leather in this attempt is from the nearby Ace Hardware.  It's also sold at Pep Boys, Home Depot, and probably other large auto supply and hardware stores.  Chamois, as I've noted before, is a type of fat-cured leather; the only difference between it and braintan is that the fish oil in chamois generates its own aldehydes as it oxidizes, so it doesn't need smoking to introduce them.  Thus, the fat is already permanently bound to the collagen, so wet chamois can be allowed to dry without kneading and will be easy to re-soften.

After cutting off some snippets for last year's casein paint experiment, I was left with 2.5 ounces of chamois.  Using the ratios from Botanical Colors, I came up with measurements of 14 grams of alum (just under a tablespoon) and 4 grams of cream of tartar (just under a teaspoon).  I dissolved both in Pyrex cups of hot water.  Interestingly the cream of tartar didn't seem to want to fully dissolve; around an eighth of a teaspoon of powder coalesced at the bottom of the cup no matter how many times I swirled it.

I dumped it all in a sink with warm tap water, added the chamois and kneaded it until it was thoroughly wet.  Tomorrow it gets hung out to dry, and with any luck we'll have some good weather ahead for the next stage.