My order of vegetable tanned kangaroo leather arrived first thing this week, and I was pretty excited to delve into my first leather working project on the Glowforge (and also, ever).
The whole project took me the better part of a day, including the time taken to watch and re-watch a few saddle stitching tutorials over on Youtube.
Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the results. I used a basic template from over at the Glowforge community forums, and added my own engraved designs onto it.
The stitch-holes were cut by the laser, which made the process of gluing and stitching the pieces together quite straightforward!
The Kangaroo leather is quite thin and very supple. I guesstimated that the Proofgrade Medium Leather settings would be close enough to give the the results I was after – and I wasn’t far off! The leather cut like butter, but one of the engraves (the fox) was a little light. Since I hadn’t moved the leather yet, I was able to run a second pass and it lined up perfectly, resulting in a slightly darker engrave – just what I was after.
I found that it was really useful to use some magnets to hold the leather down on the crumb tray, and did the engraves prior to the cuts. This meant there were no curly bits rising up into the path of the laser.
Check out the end result below!
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