Latest leather project: a belt

My brother in-law Back East commissioned a belt from me a few weeks back. Talk about a teachable moment! I'd never tried a belt before -- well, I'd recycled a thrift store leather belt for my three-year old son, Ruben's, kilt, but I hadn't tried any tooling.

In talking over what he wanted, he expressed an interest in some kind of Nicaragua-themed pattern on a simple leather 1 1/4" belt with no fancy buckle
.

I skipped down to my local Tandy Leather, picked up a vegetable tanned belt blank (my leather wasn't long enough for a belt, or I would have tried cutting a strip). Their craftsman blanks are plenty thick and good quality.  I also bought a solid brass buckle, an adjustable groover, and some tracing paper.

Then, per my process, I seized up with fear and anxiety for a few days as I considered some pattern.  Unfortunately, when I look at a blank piece of veg-tanned leather, I don't see any possibility other than the very likely one that I will screw up a valuable piece of leather with a hideously ugly pattern and a few slips of the hand with a knife.

I flipped through the Google for good images from Nicaragua. My brother in-law's style is understated.  Without getting too far down into a stereotype, he is a professor at a prestigious East Coast liberal arts school: Katherine Hepburn's alma mater, as a matter of fact. He is also, as a geologist and paleontologist, a man who gets out in the field, so something rugged and natural would be important. Earth tones.

Also trying to avoid stereotypes, it seems safe to say that, "understated" is not a cornerstone characteristic of Nicaraguan visual art. "Vibrant" may be more appropriate. There is a strong leather craft culture, and I would love to go visit and learn from some of their masters, and there is an eon of human history and art remnants, as well as rain forests, lakes, the ocean, and volcanoes for inspiration.

I knew I'd use images from stone carvings, Granada tile, pottery, and also some images from nature. I looked through the list of national symbols and picked the flower and tree, and also a jaguar and a snail, the latter recommended by his good friend.

Finally satisfied (mostly), I settled in to the actual work.

Alright, here's a quick tutorial, in case you'd like to make and tool your own belt:

First, after a few days of trying out different pattern ideas, finally commit, dammit!  This is the pattern I drafted: Steps and swirls, some native flora and fauna.

Thanks to Mr. Fashion House for the snail tip -- they look cool!

Next, bevel the edges of the belt to round them out (don't forget to wet your leather and let it dry just for a minute or so), and then groove the edge to frame your pattern. You can also cut grooves with that grooving tool, if you want to deepen the background of your belt to make your tooling marks really stand out, but, since I was going for "understated", I kept the grooves shallower.

My newest tool: a groovy adjustable groover with interchangeable tips. 

Now, it's time to trace your pattern.  I finally bit the bullet and bought honest-to-goodness tracing paper, simply because I couldn't see the pattern through regular white paper well enough to keep it in line.  Belts are long, and (especially with skinnier ones like this one) if you veer off course on your pattern, it's visible.

With wet or "cased" leather, all you need is light pressure with the stylus.

Now, it's carving time!  Again, make sure the leather is cased. Keep your knife sharp (the Tandy instructions say to consider your strop a part of your knife, and it's good advice).  If your knife starts to drag or catch, stop and strop.

Carving sets the stage for the tooling.  Note strop in the upper right.

Tooling is next.  For this project, all I did was use a beveling tool to make the cuts stand out.  I could have also use a pear shader on a couple of spots if I'd chosen.

Tall end of the beveler goes into the cut on the outside of the image. Hammer lightly.

 After carving and stamping, it's time to dye... I learned a lot from this belt, dyeing being one of them.  My dye didn't go on as evenly as I'd have liked, although it gave an impression of age that the owner really appreciates (whew!).

For more even dye applications, make sure to thoroughly clean the oils that have accumulated from your hands onto the leather -- I believe you are supposed to use some sort of denatured alcohol or oxalic acid, and I think Tandy Leather sells a "deglazer" that does the trick.  I'm looking into it.

Almost finished.  What's left?  Edge dyeing and slicking, hole punching, adding the belt keeper, and shipping off.

And here are a couple of pictures of the final product:

Solid brass buckle so it won't rub off to steel, a darker brown edge dye, and Fiebings Aussie leather conditioner applied.

The part I'm happiest with -- the belt end keeper.  The dye went on beautifully, and the stamping was just a simple and very traditional leather veiner tool.

Lesson learned:

--Belts are long and narrow, which creates some issues with design (patterns are easier to carve if they flow in a shallow diagonal), casing (keep wetting it!), and the build-up of oils and dust (keep your workspace clean -- even the floor).  

In all, it was a great experience, and now I can add belts, straps and slings to custom projects at my other website.

Winter is here... but, so is Spring, say the birds

© 2012 Joshua Stark

Last week we got our first Winter storm (1/2" of rain in 24 hours) and this week the storm doors have really opened up.  It looks like Winter through the week and on into the next.  For here, that means rain and rain and more rain in the Valley, and big snows in the aptly named Sierra Nevada. 

Of course this happens during my wife's two-week break from her 70-hour-per-week job, and my chance to get outside and work in the yard and garden...

Speaking of the garden, the severe temperature swings over the last few days (70 degrees F to 35), plus my not-by-the-minute watering, have caused my three-inch cabbages to bolt.  Thankfully, the bok choy and collard greens still look good.

The trees and vines are happy, and a few successful cuttings from my first pomegranate pruning are leafing out.  The latter is especially exciting, as I am happy to get additional trees started for either privacy from the neighbors or for sale (both?).  Heck, I could start a pomegranate orchard... if I had more than 1/8 acre, including house. 

To me, the real signs of Spring come from the sky: the local birds are paired up.  Scrub jays, mockingbirds, yellow-billed magpies and white-tailed kites are among the bigger nesting birds in our neighborhood.  The poor doves (Zenaida macroura, mourning doves) are as dumb as posts when it comes to nest location and building, building on grates, in windy spots, or so close to the door that they spook and knock their eggs through their horribly constructed nests.  The act would be quite funny if it weren't so tragic in its conclusions and came with such a melancholy song to go with it.  Nevertheless, mourning doves seem to have taken a page from the rock doves and Eurasion collared doves and are becoming quite successful city dwellers.  

I'm always happy to see our endemic magpies, Pica nuttalli, the yellow-bills.  Like all magpies, they have suffered greatly from the invasion of West Nile virus, and I fear their numbers might not adapt quickly enough to survive.  They are wonderfully colorful, and a little exotic to me, as there were never any magpies on the Delta where I grew up.  We would only see them on trips to the movies or the grocery store "in town", a forty mile drive. 

The kites are amazing flyers, passing food in mid-flight and doing other tricks, showing off to one another, and also careening into the neighborhood redtailed hawk.  They make a great example for a successful marriage.

If you've never seen Elanus leucurus you are missing out on a wonderful show.  Their hunting style is rare: they not only kite, per their name (every raptor around here kites, else they'd never eat, what with the wind). Kites hover.  Only two other birds I know hover around here, hummingbirds and kestrels.  In fact, their striking colors, plus their hovering ability and, I'm sure, their breathtaking stoops (a straight drop from hover, wings extended above) have given them another common name:  Angel kites.

We also have regular "lbb's", little brown birds of various species.  Our gigantic trees allow a number of mountain migrants to overwinter, and we often see nuthatches, creepers, juncos (whose tiny, sweet song I noticed for the first time this year), and the occasional warbler in them.  In the backyard cover, a hermit thrush makes an appearance.  A nuttall's woodpecker visits the walnut tree.  High overhead, snow geese and white-fronted geese pass to and from the local wetlands conservancy, fattening up for the couple-thousand-mile trek to Alaska for the Summer.

And, frustratingly, since my neighbors cut down their palm tree home, a mugging of starlings now pressures and bullies and pushes their way into other birds' nests.  Vile European colonists spreading their urbanizing, monochromatic influence into the neighborhood, literally kicking out eggs onto the street.  Yes, I get the irony.

Sacramento is still blessed with a good variety of birds, even with the colonizers, because of our location (on a waterfowl flyway and at the bottom of a ten thousand foot mountain range) and the amount of land we conserve for habitat.  Shoot, we even have a federally protected Wild & Scenic River running right through the city proper.

Listening to the birds, I am heartened.  I know that Spring is springing, even in this storm.  All's right with the world.

The typical salacious photo to get all the reader traffic going...

Living Wild and you - building a native plant community

© 2011 Joshua Stark

Alicia Funk over at Living Wild has posted a couple of articles on upcoming Fall field edibles.  I was asked, and provided an article on my favorite, wild roses - although it was very hard to choose just one.

If you are interested in native plants, and would like to get in touch with others like you, Ms. Funk's website is a great start.

Lands on the Margin is back! kinda...

© 2011 Joshua Stark

Last year, I stopped posting to my third blog, "Lands on the Margin", because I couldn't juggle all of the ideas I'd had, and something had to give.  However, I didn't give up on the concept, and I kept the links to the blog live, just in case.  I believed the theory was sound.

Earlier this year, I decided to revive the Lands on the Margin concept a bit, as a component of Agrarianista.  In California, the added bonus from the wild seems a natural extension of agrarianism, even of the urban variety, because we are blessed with such a rich diversity of plant life.

So, I've begun a project that combines the earlier blog with a couple of new pages here at Agrarianista around LOTM (that's "Lands On The Margin"):  A page explaining marginal lands (with links to the older blog, gear recommendations, and useful plants), and a small (soon to be growing) list of Useful Plants of California's Edgelands, with suggestions on identifying and gathering, and a couple of recipes or tips on how to use them.

The old LOTM blog will be used to post the newest entries to these or other related pages I create, so if you are interested in some information about California's bounteous edgelands, please follow the LOTM blog, too!

As always, I'm interested in getting feedback on these pages, so shoot away here (or at the relevant page, itself).

Can you believe this $#!%?! (warning: graphic pictures) and also New Plants

© 2010 Joshua Stark

After much work building raised beds to keep the ducks out of the vegetable garden... all along, I had no idea who the real culprit would be...

Those sure as heck aren't duck prints. And if you look closely, you'll see that what was left wasn't duck poop, either.

All my work, and my dog betrays me...

In better, cleaner news, we picked up a couple of native plants for the yard.  Slender sedge (on the right, below) I hope to put at the edge of the pond and the raised bed, and the sierra currant (on the left) will go in the shady spot at the back fence.