Okay so last night I was assembling a zip wallet and installing my 1st zipper. I was excited to get this baby done and put the Jerome David Awl through my finger while stitching. Actually, I got lucky and it was just a graze but it was not fun. I did some quick triage and went back to work. No one said this craft was gonna be painless but it got me thinking. What kind of mishaps have all of you encountered that can help us Newbees avoid. Here is mine from last night...Confucius says, "when saddle stitching with and razor sharp awl...know where all your digits are at all times..."
I usually manage to get a couple drops of blood on some obscure part of the leather and don’t catch it until it is dried. How did the wallet turn out?
Uhmmmmmm, the most hardcore, like straight from hell, thing that ever happened to me while leatherworking was that i stabbed myself with my exacto knife. It happens when you try to put the cap back on and well, the cap was still on the table, not at all in my hand.
And that was it :)
P.S: I am receiving my awl and clams next week, lets hope for the best xD
Leathercraft can be dangerous when not using well the tools or because we are not concentrated. I just did like you with my awl, several times and it's often when I'm thinking of something else or listening to someone talking to me :(
When I was learning leathercraft, one of the student badly cut her hand with the skiving knife (It was quite traumatic for me so even if I used it well, I wouldn't use it anymore for a while and prefered use the skiving machine). Another one slightly peeled his finger with the sanding machine because he wasn't aware of what he was doing.
Now, I'm practicing from home and I don't have these machines anymore, I have to use the skiving knife again and finally, It's alright. I use it with all precautions taught by our teacher and it's fine.
@Dave Magic OMG! My heart skipped a beat when I saw what happened!...
..is the awl ok though? 😉
The very first Instagram live I did, probably over a year ago now, I was stitching a partition to go into a laptop briefcase.
I remember setting everything up and getting ready to film.
Shortly after I went live, I was answering someones question while passing something from one hand to the other. Unfortunately I had an awl in one hand and I stabbed my other hand.
I barely felt it but I could tell it was really in there.
Luckily, Lives aren't high definition because no one noticed the amount of blood pouring out of my left hand for the next 55 mins.
I literally had to keep wiping my hand on my leg between every stitch and the side of my leg looked like a crime scene after.
In hindsight I should have just ended it and done it again the next day, but for what ever reason I soldiered on.
Everything got thrown away after including the leather wrapping on my clams and the piece I was working on. You just can't get blood out of leather.
Now whenever I hear people saying that they can't go live in case they make a mistake, I just smile.