Molded Leather Bottle Take II - Part 2

I've taken the bottle out of the molds, and I think it's pretty clear that I screwed up. First, the pictures.

This is the top of the bottle right out of the mold.
The leather always looks so beautiful to me when
it first comes out of the mold. I hate to despoil it
with decoration.

Here's the bottom of the bottle just out of the mold.
If you look closely, you'll notice where the issue is.

This is the inside of the bottle top. You can see how well-formed
the leather is from the mold. You can also see the bottom of the
bottle next to it. It's inverted. (Figured out the issue yet?)

Okay, so here's where things went wrong. In the bog find, the bottle's seam was tripled. I didn't do that in my first recreation, but wanted to do it on this one. But... when I put the bottom of the bottle on the mold, I overlapped the mold too much while trying to make sure that I had the triple seam. The bottom isn't flat, like I think the original was. No, it's significantly concave on this one. I inverted the leather while it's still kind of damp, but I don't think that's going to give me the crisp lines I'm looking for.

If you look in the third picture where the bottom can be seen in the lower right-side corner, there is a huge difference between the sharp lines on the top of the bottle and the fuzzy fold of the bottom. That's going to look ridiculous when they're sewn together. My best option is to re-wet the leather and put it on the mold the opposite direction, trimming off any excess. That should give me a semi-flat bottom, which is my objective. I can't really start putting it together until I fix this.

I trimmed the excess leather off the edge of the back and folded the back into the shape that I wanted it to be when I sewed it. (The excess leather, when tied into a bunch of knots, makes an awesome chew toy for the dog!)

Here's the back all trimmed up and folded correctly.

I still needed to do something to get that crisp fold that I was looking for, and the back mold with twine wasn't cutting it. I decided to put it into the top mold frame to let the wood do the work for me.

  

That gap isn't going to work.
I'll end up with one section all puffy.

Here's the back in the mold frame.

There we go! Issue corrected

The gap where the dowel rod goes on the bottle top isn't really a huge deal. That part could - and likely will - end up being sewn to the extra piece at the neck of the bottle anyway. So a crisp line there isn't going to matter. But I feel better knowing that if I *wanted* it crisp, it would be.

Molded Leather Bottle, Take II - Part 1
Molded Leather Bottle, Take II - Part 3

NOTE: I put my first molded bottle into our Kingdom's A&S competition, and a judge said that it was possible that the bog find hadn't had a flat back at all. Rather, it was possible that the back had simply caved in, but had been as rounded as the front. I don't buy that for a couple of reasons:

1) If you look closely at the pictures of the bog find, you can tell that there isn't nearly enough dip in the back to have had it as convex and bulbous as the front. It looks, to me, as if there had been pressure on the back of the bottle while it was wet that had stretched the leather inward. 

The back of the 10th century Irish bog find bottle. What do you think?
Was it rounded and just squashed in? Or was it flat and sunken?
 Or, was it made with a concave back just like it is?

2) There have been bottles found throughout history where the backs of traveling bottles were flat. The reason for this is two-fold. The flat back doesn't bounce around as much as the rounded fronts, and bottles with a flat side are more stackable than bottles that are rounded all the way around. That's convenient when you're stacking bottles for traveling on wagons or carts.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to post them in the comments.