Sunday, April 13, 2014

Leather fly rod case

A few months ago I went to a dump and salvaged quite a few yards of leather from old couches and recliners. After seeing the work of an amazing artist I was inspired (and I'm hard to inspire these days) to make my own fly rod case. So I took this dump grade leather and I made a case. It was OK. I made a ton of mistakes but it was pretty good still... good enough that I was asked to make another. Here's a bit of the process... it took maybe ~20 hours.
The top cap. 

Top cap sewn.

My first top cap on the right and the new design on the left.

The handle ready to hand stitch. The handle is one piece of doubled leather with no seam. Tricky to make actually.  

The handle being sewn on (with the finished top cap)

You have to basically finish everything before you're done. This is the handle sewn to the tube's final wrap. If I got the size of the final wrap wrong then I did ~500 hand stitches for nothing.  



Done and to the owner. He was super psyched and already had a place on his wall for the case. 

The bottom of the case. 


I botched the stitching... it's a 1/2 stitch off. I pre-punched over 100 holes and missed the mark by a millimeter and it shows in the stitches. Not quite "skilled". 

On the owners wall.

5 comments:

Andy said...

Now that is art! I would not want one of those banging around the back of the Jeep or getting loused up any other ways either. Too pretty for that.

skatona said...

Impressive, Lucho - nice work!

mike_hinterberg said...

Beautiful, I bet it was rewarding to make and even more so to give it to someone that appreciated it. Inspirational stuff!

Lucho said...

Thank you Deanna... I did hear! I'm working on trying to get home on Friday.

Dave said...

Hey man! Havne't checked in here in a while but awesome to see you're still up to cool things! It's always inspiring coming here to read. Hope all is well!