After a 50 year hiatus from a budding interest in leather craft to do a few things like go military for a couple of years back in the '60's, come back, get married, have kids, get divorced, have 2 entirely different careers spanning most of those 50 odd years, here I am now. To illustrate how much time I had on my hands when I retired in 2008, I am just now getting back into re-learning leather working. I remember so little about my early days tooling leather but one thing my dad drilled into my head, he told me, "If you want to spend time learning something, ...anything..., focus on learning and have no distractions if you want to be able to say , 'I was pretty good at that, whatever it was', and don't waste your time in a noisy environment when there is learning to be done," This is the first video of yours that I attempted to watch and I have to say, there is one or two men in this field who also preach about distractions and both of them are very well known, Mr. Bruce Cheaney and Mr. Al Stohlman. That music in the background was very nice, I could listen to it over a cold beer all afternoon, but it is very distracting when a person is trying to take in information which you may find so easy it is like buttoning your shirt. But to many of us, it is quite offsetting to trying to learn something that, in your own words, is a "Deceptively hard thing to do right". If memory serves me, one of the very first tools I bought was a basket weave tool from the original Tandy Leather store in Texas back in the '50's. Yeah, it was hard for me to learn but I had nobody to show me how to use any of the tools needed to do this work. It took me many tries just to figure out how to line up the tool so the image looked like basket weave instead of chicken scratch all over my piece of leather, [the side of an old high top hunting boot I tore down for the leather to practice on!]. I say this because, in one of my careers, I also taught the trade with which I made my living, and the very first year I taught a fresh out of high school group of guys, I was "caught" doing the exact same thing. I taught a one year program in Auto Body Repair and owned and operated my own shop for 9 years prior to going into teaching. My first task was to show my class how to "rough out" a minor dent in a front fender using a body hammer and dolly. After about 15 minutes of banging and hammering and doing what needed to be done, I stopped and asked if there were any questions. There was dead silence in the shop ..... then one young man stood up and he asked, "Mr. Tom, I can see clearly and I understand what you are doing with that body hammer but tell me, what the heck is that big hunk of steel in your other hand that you have hidden behind the fender supposed to do?" Straightening dents was so familiar to me on a daily basis that I forgot to mention the one crucial tool that allowed me to "roll out" a dent like it was some kind of child's play!! I will let you be the judge of how important it may be, to those of us who are learning something that you may well know like the back of your hand, to find a focus without noisy distractions, but I will try a couple more of your videos to make sure I didn't pull the trigger prematurely on learning from your videos. I find that, at 75 years into my journey on this planet, I still have a craving to learn new things. I hope that you will be one of my teachers .........
Thank you very much for the turorial. I agree with others in that a lower volume music would make your videos better, but the good lesson is what matters most. Hope you make more videos.
Was interested in this process, but that music was just too much. Couldn't get past more than two minutes or so. Good luck getting viewers with such poor attention to detail!
Beautifully done. Thank you for sharing your technique! You and I seem to have the same attitude towards things as well! My cousin was watching the video with me and he said we would probably get along great, LOL 😂
I thought the music was fine and I learned a lot from this, I've been trying to do this but keep failing, I have two basket weave stamps and didn't realize one was bigger than the other, I was using the small one and without making a straight line to follow, I'll make a line next time and use my big one, thanks
One of the best videos on basket weave I have seen. Thanks. By the way, who is it that makes the Little Wacker square mallet? My audio burped as you were telling about it.
Don’t really like the border look on basket weave. My first and only time so far was a business card holder and I just faded the basket weave into the stitch line.
I disliked your video for 1 reason not even 37 seconds into it. Turn the music down. It's easier to hear you explain thing and is not distracting like it now.
Would have liked to watch this, but the music and the volume so completely competed with one another that I stopped it after 1:32 and decided to leave. No subscribing to this waste of band width,
its good info, but yes, the music is very hard to hear over. you're also trying to talk over it making it feel even louder than it already is and makes it sound like you are unsure of what you're doing, which isn't true after watching the full video. I hope this gave some good advice and I hope to see more of your stuff.
D436 is a very common stamp. Not sure why you're buying it in a set. I've seen it at both Tandy and SLC (They carry Realeather just don't mention the brand I don't think), probably a lot more. Just go to the Tandy or SLC website and search for D436. It's a camo stamp and will run you about 8 bucks pretty much anywhere.
After drawing the start line, it seems that the placement of the die is critical. You explain how to line up after the first impression but it’s almost impossible to seehohw you do it on the video as there is either a shadow or your hand blocks the view. Frustrating as hell to try to see and the hammer or your hand blocks the view. Clearly you know what you’re doing but I wish it were easier to see. As an aside, the background sound is distracting to me.
Enjoyed both the video about the how-to portion AND the music. I do have an odd question, though. If you are trying to apply the basket weave pattern over a curved surface that cannot be laid out flat, are there any changes in how you approach the layout to make it all flow together right? What I am wanting to do is to simulate a fiberglass weave pattern into a plastic surface and the pattern is a pretty good match for the basket weave, so I was thinking of getting one of the stamps and heating it enough to emboss the pattern into the plastic, then painting it, smoothing it off, and sealing it with a clear coat. I would think that rocking it over the curves *should* work, but I am not certain about how to lay out the guide line(s) to get it to match up. Any suggestions? Thanks.
I don't like hitting with a maul especially with the nerve damage in my arm so I use an old bronze head Lixie hammer. It weighs 12 oz and is perfect for me as I cannot hold the tool in my left hand because not enough gripping strength. So I hold stamp with right hand (am right-handed) and hammer with left, actually after practice I do better than I did before I hurt my arm.
