Making A Fancy Leather Pancake Sheath For My Old Pocketknife - Leather Craft

Making a tooled leather pocketknife pancake sheath. If you own an old-fashioned pocketknife that lacks a pocket clip like most modern-day pocketknives have, and you’re not fond of it laying at the bottom of your pocket bumping into everything else, then this may be the leather project for you. Made from a minimal amount of natural vegetable tanned leather, this is a great inexpensive beginner project that can be a blank canvas for creating your own unique design with dye colors and tooling patterns. If you want to learn how to layout a pattern for your specific size pocketknife, I recommend checking out this video from saddle maker Don Gonzales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFxBK11KEOc. He shows his process of laying out and designing a pancake style sheath pattern for any size pocketknife. For my sheath I decided to try an intricate diamond tooling pattern on the front side and a simple border and cross on the back side. But if you want to go with a simpler looking sheath, you can always skip the tooling altogether for a cleaner aesthetic. As far as the color of my sheath, I wanted the sheath to have a ventage look, so instead of applying the dye fade using my airbrush (which gives a consistent looking fade), I applied the dye using a fade technique I learned from leather-craft master Freddie Matara. https://www.instagram.com/freddie.matara.leather/. This process involves applying dye using a small piece of compact cloth and rubbing the dye into the leather using small circular motions while allowing some overlap of different color shades to create the fade. After applying the dye in this fashion and after adding some antique paste, the result is a very antique rustic look that makes a new project look well worn and vintage. The sheath is handstitched together using beige colored Tiger Thread which really pops with high contrast against the darker tones of the sheath. I hope you enjoy this leather sheath project video and try making one for yourself. What is th