As promised:
All of the pieces cut out, edges beveled and a 1/4" border:
Next, we need to prepare the pattern we're carving from. Because we're lazy as **** and, as a higher order of life, capable of planning, we're going to put packing tape over our pattern to allow us to reuse it over and over:
Lay it out over your wetted leather and trace it on with a modeling stylus. Go over it again because two layers of packing tape plus a layer of paper takes a lot of the depth out:
Swivel knife the **** out of it. Next, we'll take our trusty beveller (sorry for the blurry pic):
* around with the piece a good bit more to give it some more character without spending 4 hours on an 8"^2 piece and making it too busy:
Continue the themes through the rest of the piece, making sure to skip the toe box because you're not entirely certain how you want to proceed with this, even knowing that you'll likely form, dye and finish an entire piece only to throw it away in the end after you change your mind. Oh, look, here everything is with the shoe in question after toasting it in your (POS) temperamental oven for a couple hours:
Decide that you have entirely too much clearance between the end of your toes and the beginning of the armor and that adding another layer of 3/8" thick leather (Protip: I don't **** around) on top of that for aesthetic reasons on an entirely aesthetic piece is just too much. Realize that you can just cut into the original piece, which gives you a
legitimate excuse to use stitching on a piece. Cut. Don't forget the piece of black latigo that goes underneath.
Next: The oft neglected red headed stepchild of armoring: edge burnishing.
Edge burnishing is, frankly, rad as ****. The basics of it are that you take a tree sap mixed with water (gum tragacanth), coat your edges with it and rub the **** out of it until the friction causes it to melt and fill the leather's pores creating a watertight, smooth glossy surface on your piece's edges.
Oh ****, here it is:
Note that Tandy sells things like edge slickers and bone folders that are supposed to be designed to melt down tragacanth for these purposes. They're almost wholly useless. I use the * end of a Sharpie marker; you can use any plastic, bone, ivory (HAH) or heavy cloth you might have lying around.
Here's a picture of what unfinished leather edges look like (sorry, no macro, deal with it):
And here is the edges after burnishing:
Note how glossy and amazing they are? Of course you do.
Here's a final angle of everything (very, very loosely) put together after hardening, tooling and burnishing:
I'm not sure when I'll be able to get some more work in on this piece, but expect the next picture update to contain (at the very least) dye and paint. I'd love to have a completely finished piece next, but promising such would be, uh, irresponsible.