Leather Tooling and Carving

Rating:
Summary: good for workin' hog hide
Review: Now if you ask me, and plenty of Davey Crocket fans do now and again, if you are set on creating your own Davey Crocket buckskin jacket, then this here instructional book is about the best you are ever going to do. I got this one from the good folks at Amazon (dot com if you will) and commenced to make me a jacket here a while back. It wasn't deer season so I couldn't get me no buckskin to use, but Millie Tillman's extended family came in for a gathering and she had a couple of hogs butchered and put on a spit out beside her double wide trailer, and I managed to get her to allow me to take the hog skins to use for leatherworking.

If you commence to working with hog skins then you need to tan them first. I didn't know this and went ahead on and dried them in the sun (by laying them out on the roof of our double wide trailer for a couple weeks) and then cut them up and sewed them together. The hog skin jacket looked pretty good for a while and I wore it to church a couple of times with my Sunday go to Meetin' clothes, but after I got caught out in the rain once or twice that thing started to smell like a dead, rotting hog on the side of the road. People in church were all turning around and crinkling their noses trying to figure out what was reeking so much. I got me a couple of them little perfumed cardboard trees they sell for hanging from the rearview mirror of your car and I hung them on the jacket. It didn't make much of a difference, so I went back to Chester's Bulk Larder out on Route 8 and got me a couple dozen of them and used duct tape to stick them all over the inside of the hog skin jacket. It covered up the rotting smell of the hog flesh, but surrounded me in a cloud of sickly sweet bouquet that was even more unsettling than the fetid tang of rotting pig.

The jacket ended up being given to Clyde "Blackie" Boyle and he threw it in the backyard kennel for his three hunting dogs (Linda, Daisy, and Turpentine) to chew on. They had that thing torn apart and chewed up and gone within an afternoon. That was the extent of my leatherworking experience, but this book has given me some ideas and I reckon I might try again soon. I been looking at the pictures of what they suggest and it looks pretty easy and I need me a new addition to my Sunday go to Meetin' clothes so I'm fixin' to try again here directly.

Rating:
Summary: Good addition to your leather working library
Review: This is a good book of project and design ideas for those still mastering the skills of leathercraft, as well as, the accomplished leather worker looking for different ideas. Projects are on a basic to intermediate level of accomplishment.

Rating:
Summary: Leather Tooling & Carving
Review: Upon receiving the book, I was NOT too impressed. Although the book had some good "tid-bits" of information, it did not stand-up to it's title. (TOOLING & CARVING). About 1/5th of the book covered "tooling & carving" VERY LIGHTLY, and the rest were leather-working projects. As a matter of fact, keep in mind that this books copyright date is 1950 - so you can guess at some of the projects. But it is a decent book, and does cover some of the topics "lightly". I wish I could find something else to help me raise it to a rating of THREE STARS...but I can't. But as a helpful hint, you cannot go wrong with any of the "Al Stohlman" leather-working books. (Look for these, invest in these, be pleased with these). So to end, it's an OK book, but you can invest in a better product. Support your local leather-craft distributers, as they should carry the above mentioned books. (Hey...I bet Amazon.com may carries one or two of "Al's" books).

Rating:
Summary: Leather Tooling & Carving
Review: Upon receiving the book, I was NOT too impressed. Although the book had some good "tid-bits" of information, it did not stand-up to it's title. (TOOLING & CARVING). About 1/5th of the book covered "tooling & carving" VERY LIGHTLY, and the rest were leather-working projects. As a matter of fact, keep in mind that this books copyright date is 1950 - so you can guess at some of the projects. But it is a decent book, and does cover some of the topics "lightly". I wish I could find something else to help me raise it to a rating of THREE STARS...but I can't. But as a helpful hint, you cannot go wrong with any of the "Al Stohlman" leather-working books. (Look for these, invest in these, be pleased with these). So to end, it's an OK book, but you can invest in a better product. Support your local leather-craft distributers, as they should carry the above mentioned books. (Hey...I bet Amazon.com may carries one or two of "Al's" books).