Tooled Leather

Embossing, Tooling, Personalisation

What is tooling?

'Tooling' is a general term used for applying artwork onto leather. For example carving, similar to making lithographic plates, embossing, like we see on this belt for example. Tooling in my world is done by using metal stamps or an embossing machine.

Tooling

Tooled leather has been worked, cut, shaped, stamped or formed with tools to create patterns and text.

The leather I use is often called "tooling leather". It is undyed veg tanned leather.

The required pattern is drawn onto tracing paper. The leather is then ‘cased’ (surface dampened) as this will help the leather receive the pattern more readily. The tracing paper is placed onto the leather and a stylus is used to trace the drawing onto the leather.

Once this is done, a swivel knife is used to cut the lines around the pattern or drawing at about 1mm to 2mm deep.

Bevels, stamps and other embossing tools for leather are used with a mallet (actually a poly maul) to stamp into the leather. Typically, these embossing tools for leather are no bigger than your small finger nail! So a lot of stamping goes into tooled leather.

Some tooled leather work can take days, while other can be a few minutes. It just depends on what the pattern is. The more text and the more elaborate, the longer this part of the work will take.

You can see lots of tooling work in the examples below and for variety, have a look at my guitar straps and these accessories.

Using a Swivel Knife

Various Stamping Tools

Embossing

Embossing is impressing an image or text into the leather (more accurately - debossing). This is usually done by using a press or embossing machine for straps such as the example here.

An example of embossing is this belt, is done with a leather embossing tool, which presses patterns into the leather.

The process starts with casing the leather, as we do for tooling and then running the leather through the leather embossing tool.

Embossing Machine for Straps

Personalisation

With tooling done by hand, you have a lot of scope for creativity, whether it be adding a name or a graphic design. Combined with colour and texture, you will have a bespoke, one-off personalised leather item.