Create Recklessly Faux Leather: Prepping Your Hammer

Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
hi i'm melissa cable with create recklessly and i'm here to show you how to pierce holes and sew in lace into faux leather the first thing i'd like to show you is how to use our different types of tools one of my favorites is the sewing punch and that's because we can get really good fine holes the sewing punch has a rotating platform on the bottom that provides different size holes the peg at the top can only go as deep as the size of the hole so you're ensured a pretty consistent hole size every time the rotary hole punch goes from two millimeters to four point five millimeters in hole size what I really like about this punch is that it has a reservoir that will collect all of your scraps so you can easily empty out any scrap and throw it away or I like to save it you never know when you want little tiny circles to do inlays into your leather it rotates very easily so that you can pick the size that you want and has a very comfortable handle that's easy to squeeze so we'll use some of these during our video the other way to create holes is using to create wrecklessly toolkit which has four different hole sizes that will attach to the interchangeable handle allowing you to easily create holes on the surface of your leather using just the tool and your hammer let's take a look at different ways you can create holes and slots to sew so we covered round holes using the sewing punch the rotary cutter and the four hole punches with the interchangeable kit but also in the interchangeable kit you have three other tools that work great for creating i'm slots too so in the first is the triple prong slot piercer the second is the three millimeter stop piercer you can see the width of this is approximately three millimeters and then the third is the 1.5 millimeters slot piercer you can see this is a smaller about half the size of the three millimeter now my favorite among all of these is the triple piercing I'm going to show you why you put our tool on to the handle we are going to create a straight line of slots that'll be very easy for us to sew into in order to do this you're going to make your first pierce now you're going to place the first prong into the last hole you just cut and hit again now you have five holes again the first prong into the last hole and again and so you're going to notice what you're slowly doing is creating a straight evenly spaced line of holes that will be perfect for you to sew into let's just do a few more now sometimes in thicker materials you'll find that when you use your prongs you will have a hard time getting the tool out of the material what you can do is simply rock it back and forth to pull it out however the faux leather is very easy to work with and it comes out almost instantly there we go so now you can see we have a really great straight line of evenly spaced holes we can use these holes to sew two pieces of leather together we can use these holes to sew something on to the surface of the leather or we can use these holes to just do surface decorations with stitches which I do often so take for example here's some super-lon super-lon is a great thread to use when decorating or connecting faux leather pieces together because it comes in a lot of different colors and the thickness really allows it to have some contrast on the surface of the leather when I'm sewing with super-long I like to use tapestry needles because they have bit of a bigger eye allowing you to easily thread the super lawn into the needle but because the faux leather has some stretch it'll allow this larger eye to go through no problem so let's start on the end and take it through you can see almost seamlessly I'm able to go back and forth in and out of this leather now the faux leather is easy enough to pierce that you don't have to pre punch your holes too so however by using the triple prong piercer you can get very even stitches and that's going to be the big difference between having a really finished piece with a good even design why don't at the end of my line the good thing about the triple piercer is that the holes are large enough for me to easily go back into them again with the needle so for example if I want to fill in all the gaps having a straight line of thread I can simply go right back through with my needle and you can see that it fits through no problem and I'm able to get a really good clean line of thread making a decorative decision on the surface of my leather so you can see the triple piercer really gives a good straight line for your stitches using the triple piercer in conjunction with the other two you can then do curves by individually creating slots when you need to in order to go around a curve and then going back to your triple prong then you can another tool to create really straight lines when you're stitching is the over stitch wheel the over stitch wheel comes with three different interchangeable wheels that will create five six or seven impressions per inch they're very easy to add on to the wheel by simply removing the school and interchanging them now the over stitch wheel will not Pierce the holes in your faux leather it'll simply create an impression on it so that you know where you need to place holes to get them even now in a lot of other materials the over stitch wheel will leave a very clear impression of where those holes need to be on the faux leather because of slightly self-healing you're going to want to really go back and forth a few times to get a good impression now you can see when you pick it up when I want to find the holes I'll Bend along the line I made and you'll see slight impressions for your holes now when I create holes for these this is where I'll come back and use the sewing punch and maybe I'm gonna go one down because I don't want a very large hole and I'm going to go over each of these impressions slowly creating a straight line for my needle to go through to again create straight stitches but once again the over stitch wheel in conjunction with the sewing punch really gives me more control over the length of my stitches I can make them as short as five stitches per inch or as long as seven stitches per inch so we talked about three different ways to create holes using the sewing punch the rotary punch and then the punches from our interchangeable toolkit and we also talked about two different ways to create straight stitching paths using the triple prong and the over stitch wheel in conjunction with our sewing punch I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about piercing and sewing today and I hope you get a chance to watch some of our other videos on how to set Hardware and work with faux leather thanks for watching you