How Leather Tooling Works

429 strikes of a mallet in 15 seconds.

Tooling leather refers to the process of imprinting repeating, permanent designs deep into the leather by stamping. My floral engravings are done through a slightly different process called carving, there are no stamps for those designs.

Some mass manufactured goods have their designs imprinted with one large, purpose built stamp in a large hydraulic press. This is usually called embossing, or sometimes debossing.

Fill and border stamps from my collection

For a smaller maker offering a diverse range of products, as convenient as it would be, it would be unrealistic to have one of those purpose built stamps for everything I sell.

Here at Wizened Oak Leather, I do things the old fashioned way, and that means hand tooling. On this page are photos of my stamping tools in their rack on my workbench. I have around 200 stamping tools in regular use and some 600 in my whole collection. These stamps can be combined in countless different ways to create an endless variety of effects. Some of these are for fill patterns like the imitation woven texture shown at the top of the page, others are for border details, and still others are designed to enhance the floral engraving work that I do with little embellishments.

These stamps are used to embellish my floral carvings.

Whatever design you intend to tool in the leather, the first step is always the same. The raw material must be soaked in water to soften the fibers before the stamps can leave their marks. This is called "casing" the leather. When the leather is allowed to dry out, those fibers lock up again and hold the stamped design permanently.

Getting the right moisture content in the leather is crucial. Too wet and the leather will stretch and warp, too dry and the stamp will not take. Getting the best result requires experience and patience.

The tray made in the video at the top of the page.

The stamps are quite small, most are about a quarter of a square inch in surface area. To fill a large area with a repeating pattern requires striking the stamp, repositioning it, striking again, and repeating many times until the whole area has been filled. The tray shown to the left was made with 143 impressions of a single stamp, and that is one of the largest stamps I own. The video at the top of the page shows this same tray being made.

Once a design has been tooled and allowed to dry, I apply several coats of dye, with the final coat being an "antique" finish. This is a thicker paste like product, which collects in all the tiny details left by the stamp and darkens as it dries, creating fantastic contrast.

Below is a gallery of images showing a variety of tooled leather goods. My tooled leather goods currently for sale can be found here.