Sunday, January 6, 2008

Scrap leather


I recently was given some left over elk leather from my older brother. So far I have been able to make a few small projects, but I have been having just as much fun using up the really small stuff. I have been making rope out of some very suprizingly small pieces. In this picture I only used the outside pieces after they were trimmed up a bit.







Hopefully the quarter gives you an idea of the size pieces I am working with.







This is from the the left piece in the picture above. I was amazed that I was able to get over four feet of cord from such a small piece of leather.






I might have an entry focusing on just making cordage (rope) from natural matieral, but for now here is the start of my rope.














This is a very easy skill to learn but not so easy to try and photograph. The basic movement is called a 'reverse wrap'. The bottome cord is twisted away from the person making the rope. Then it comes back over the top cord toward the person's body. Then ofcourse repeat on the now bottome cord.







Here are my finished pieces of rope. I could splice them together to make one longer rope if I wanted. So don't throw away any leather after a bigger project. Everything can be used.

2 comments:

Mungo said...

That's very interesting - I hadn't thought of using leather or even rawhide by rolling it together to make cordage. But then again, I don't work on cordage much.

Enjoy your blog - I've added yours to my blogroll - hope that's okay.

Cheers,

Mungo

Owen said...

nice looking rope, good to see even the small scraps going to some use :-)