Custom sheaths I made last week

Hey everyone,

I know a few of you follow me on Instagram and would've already seen these, but I thought I'd share my latest custom sheaths I made last week.

I have a knife collector that brings me work regularly typically in the form of custom sheaths. He brought in these two knives from a knife maker in Sydney that are pretty Japanese style, so I came up with this design. It's basically a leather version of a saya, normally made of wood. I did an inlay to look a little like the handle of a katana.

So stingray leather cant be skived really, unless you sand it down from the top. but I needed the top intact for the look of the inlay, so I had to recess the leather under the stingray leather in the inverse shape to what I would've skived off the stingray leather. Basically cut a groove and scoop out some leather so the rayskin sits flush with the leather surface. I then split some calf leather down to 0.4 mm and then turned both edges of a strip to make a 12.5 mm wide strip with no visible cut edge. these were then twisted and glued into place. I then cut out the inlay window, and sewed that over the top.

I stitched it all with 0.4mm cabled polyester thread from Wuta. The poly for strength, cabled for the looks. 3.0mm stitching was the finest I've ever done on a sheath. Because I do all of my sheaths with an awl, it was a challenge to get every stitch nice and straight through 11mm of leather. I managed to do ok, but there were a couple of stitches on the rear that would've been closer to 2.0 than 3.0. but oh well.

My elbows are sore from the effort of burnishing the edges, but I think these sheaths turned out ok. There's some videos on my insta if you want to see more of them. Here's a link.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B3vzxVCA2sU/?utm_source=ig_web_options_share_sheet

Thanks for looking!

Martin