Sand-Packed Leather Bottle

I've had a number of people ask me how to make the sand-packed leather bottles, so I thought I'd throw a tutorial up for you all to see how I make them. I made a tiny little leather bottle for CosPlay that uses all of the same techniques as its larger counterpart.

Just so we're clear, I do not claim to be a leather expert, nor do I claim that this is the *only* or the *best* way to make a sand-packed leather bottle. This is the way that *I* make them. They hold water, and they look much better than a plastic water bottle at events. If you come up with a better method or some suggestions, please feel free to put them in the comments for others to learn from.

Materials that I use

Materials

• 5-6 ounce leather
• Waxed linen thread or sinew
• Utility knife
• Large-eye, blunt needles
• Paper
• Pen
• Awl
• Scissors
• Diamond stitching chisel (I used a two-prong and a six prong chisel)
• Cutting mat
• Small bowl of water
• Sponge or paper towel
• Block of wood
• Wooden or rawhide mallet
• Beeswax
• Small-rock sand
• 3/8" dowel rod

A note about the materials: You can use heavier or lighter leather, but there are pluses and minuses to both. Lighter leather will tear more easily when sewing and when packing, but will also give you a bit more definition and will be lighter when full of water. Heavier leather will be heavier to carry, harder to sew, and will probably require more wax. It will be sturdier, however, and more resistant to damage and wear and tear. I've found that the 5-6 ounce leather is about the perfect weight, as it is easier to sew, lighter to carry, and still holds up well for use. 

The diamond stitching chisels are a godsend, and are relatively cheap, so far as tools go. They keep your holes evenly space, and the diamond shape makes it far easier to sew than a simple round hole made by awls. If you don't have these, make sure that you have a pair of pliers on hand to pull your needle through the holes, and a slew of extra needles, as you'll end up breaking the eyes on those often.

Process

Make Pattern

Take your paper and pen and draw out the pattern of the bottle that you want. When you do this, there are a couple of things to keep in mind: 1) Your bottle must have smooth sides and no sharp turns, or you won't be able to get the sand into the spaces to puff them out; 2) You're going to be sewing this bottle, and the more weirdness you create now, the harder it will be on you later; 3) Make sure that the mouth of the bottle is neither too large nor too small.

I chose a simple teardrop design for my little bottle, with added "handles" to tie it to a belt. I folded my paper in half, and drew only half of the bottle shape. Then, I cut the shape out and unfolded the paper. This gave me an even shape that matched on both sides.

  

I then laid the paper pattern down on the leather and with my awl, traced it out twice. I didn't wet the leather at all, though you could. In this case, I didn't find it necessary. 

 

Now, I had two pieces of the same size and shape. Yay! Now you're ready to mark your design and make your holes.

Design and Holes

For my little bottle, I used my awl and drew a star shape on one side and a stylized M on the other. To do this, I soaked a paper towel with water and damped the leather faces evenly and thoroughly. I didn't want the leather to be drenched, but I did want it wet enough to easily take the designs. Make sure that you dampen the whole face, even if you're only going to put the design in one small area. Every time the leather gets wet, it discolors the leather slightly. To avoid weird water-marks, wet the whole thing.

Bottle design after the holes were already put in

I also marked the front and back up a bit with my awl because I wanted the bottle to seem worn and battered for the CosPlay it's going to be used for.

Sofya, my friend and instructor on all things leather, had this amazing tool that she used that she would run along the edges of the pieces. It cut a groove at exactly the same distance all the way around, while giving the thread a place to settle into so it didn't stick out above the leather surface. I, however, don't have one of those. So, instead, I took my awl and carefully drew a line all around the edge of the bottle, trying to keep it the same distance from the edge all the way around. (The distance being about 1mm.) It wasn't perfect, but it gave me a visual for where to use the chisel, and created a slight dip for the thread to go into.

The grooves drawn into the pieces

Then I took the chisel out and started making holes. I should note that the leather was still a little wet when I started, and this caused the chisel to stretch and distort the holes a little bit when I pulled it out. As the leather dried, it because much easier to punch the holes.

On one side at a time, place the chisel at the top of the bottle, near the lip of the mouth. Pound the chisel through the leather onto the board with a rawhide or wooden mallet. Remove the chisel, and place one of the tongs in the last hole made, lining the rest down the length of the aw-drawn edge lines. Pound those holes in, then repeat all the way around. By putting one of the tongs in the last hole you made, you maintain the same distance between the sewing holes.

Pounding the chisel into the bottle

Tools used to make the holes

You can see that I probably should have used the two-prong chisel around the bottom curves to make it less straight, but for this bottle, I wanted it to have a rustic, unprofessional look, so I didn't worry too much about it. Use the tools you need to make the bottle what you want, even if what you want is ungainly and ugly. :)

While you're going around, do your best to make sure you're creating the same number of holes on both sides of the bottle. On this little bottle, that was easy. I just counted how many times I used the six-prong chisel, and made sure they matched up. On larger bottles, it's a bit more difficult, but the six-prong chisel is incredibly helpful with that. It spaces everything out evenly, and if you've cut your patterns out to match, it should all match up well when you sew. If not, there are methods to fix "odd" holes.

Sewing

Here's where things get a bit tricky. When you're sewing these bottles, the objective is to minimize leakage. When done correctly, there should be zero leakage. The best method to do this is by sewing the bottle with a stitch called a "saddle stitch". Because there are far better tutorials on YouTube and a variety of different websites than I'm likely to make, I didn't bother getting into the nitty-gritty of that particular stitch here. (I really like the Instructables step-by-step, found here: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-saddle-stitch-leather/?ALLSTEPS. As I said, though, there are a lot of options. Look around until you find one that makes sense to you.)

The interesting thing with these bottles is that you can't just start at the top hole. If you do that, the very top of the bottle (the lip of the mouth) will split open. So you have to wrap around the top edge first, and then follow the holes down and around the edge of the bottle. 

You can see how I went around the top edge and then down the length of the bottle. I sewed the "handlles" after the whole bottle was sewn together, though I could have done it at the same time by just going back down the same holes next to the handles.

Here is the bottle completely sewn together. I also trimmed up the straight edges toward the bottom of the bottle.

If you find that you're got an "odd" hole as you go around, what I normally do is double-up the sewing on the side with fewer holes to make sure that there are no gaps. What I mean by that is I will take the needle on the side with the extra hole through the extra hole and out on the other side through a hole that has already been used. Then I'll take the other needle back through the same spaces. Take that same needle up to the next empty hole, and pass it through to the next empty hole on the other side. That way you're not leaving any empty spaces which might create leakage later.

I'm not sure if that makes sense or not. I'll draw a diagram later and put it up.

Packing the Bottle

The type of bottle that we're making requires that the bottle be soaking wet before we put the sand into it to form and shape it. Because my bottle was so small, I just stuck it in a bowl of water and let it sit for a while. For larger bottles, the easiest way to soak the bottle is to open the mouth under the faucet and let it run for a while, making sure that the whole thing is getting wet. This isn't a time to be light-handed with the water. You want the leather saturated through.

Once it's water-logged, grab your funnel, your sand, and a 3/8" piece of dowel rod. Put the funnel into the mouth of the bottle, and pour sand in until it won't hold anymore. Take the dowel rod and ram the sand in hard, packing it as tightly as you can. Take care not to rub the leather when you do this, as it might distort the leather into lines or ridges. You want the sand to shape the bottle, not the dowel rod. Pack as much sand into the bottle as it can possibly take, making sure to stamp it down throughout the length and depth of the bottle. Once the sand is all the way to the top, tamp it down tightly into the neck of the bottle so that it is round and open.

In this case, the funnel is larger than the mouth of the bottle.
I had to carefully hold them together to get the lentils in. Plus, since
the bottle was so small, I could only put about six lentils into it at a
time before I had to tamp it in with the end of my awl.

Whatever shape your bottle is in right now is the shape that it will be when it's finished. Make sure that it's what you want. Then set the bottle aside to dry completely. Depending on the humidity, it can take anywhere from 24-48 hours for it to dry totally.

On my little bottle, I used lentils because they were handy, and I only had a few on hand anyway. (Who's going to eat just a 1/4 cup of lentils, really?) The issue with lentils is that they can, and often do, get stuck inside the bottles when they dry on the leather. You can remove them by putting a couple of screws into the bottle and shaking it vigorously. You'll probably have to do it a few times, especially if your bottle has squared-off edges anywhere. This is why sand is a lot more popular than lentils.

Waxing and Sealing

Once the bottle is completely dry, pour all of the sand out. To make sure you get all of it out, drop a couple of small screws into the bottle and shake it vigorously, then pour it all out. Do this several times until the only thing that comes out are the screws.

Now you want to heat up your beeswax. It seems easiest to heat the wax in a double boiler system with a metal can sitting in a water bath on a fire. I have mine in a small cauldron that it stays in most of the time. Use what you have that won't scorch the wax.

My wax in my cauldron. Not the best way to heat wax, it seems.
It got too hot and overheated the bottle a little bit.

Set it on to heat, and once the wax is completely melted, you're ready to go. Using a funnel that will now be dedicated to waxing things, put it into the mouth of the bottle. Pour some wax into the bottle and swish it around, paying close attention to the seams. Pour out the excess, and then do it again. You're going to keep doing this until you can see the wax permeating the leather, and that takes a while. Just keep pouring the wax in, letting it rest in the bottle for a few seconds, then pouring it out. Again, you want to pay closest attention to the seams, but you also want the whole bottle to be saturated through. Don't worry about build up. Each time you pour the hot wax into the bottle, it melts away the build up inside, and reheats the leather, making it easier to permeate it.

 

Once the entire bottle has changed color, you're done! Pour any excess out, and hang the bottle to cool and harden. When it's completely cooled, pour some water into it to determine how water-tight it is. If there are any leaks, heat your wax up again, and redo the waxing process, allowing the wax to settle mostly where the leaks are. Keep doing that process until there are no more leaks.

 


Because the cauldron overheated the wax, the leather started to wilt a bit. You can see that in the middle picture above. I put the dowel into the neck to maintain the shape while it cooled and dried. It's still slightly off-kilter, but that actually works for this bottle, since I was going for that rustic look. If you want your bottle to maintain the shape that it has while the sand is in it, though, be very careful not to overheat the wax. A double-boiler will help a lot with that.

Now, it's time to buff the heck out of the bottle. Take a clean, white linen cloth and buff it until it shines. You're getting rid of any excess wax in the bottle, and giving the bottle a beautiful glean. Once that's done, you're good to go! 

 

And so you can see what an intentionally pretty bottle looks like, here's the one that I made for my husband for events.

 


That's it. Not too terribly hard, is it? I'd love to see what you create. Please feel free to comment with pictures, suggestions, or just to say hi. :)

DISCLAIMER: Some time ago, my friend, Her Ladyship Sofya Chyudskaya Smolyanina (modernly known as Anne McKinney), took a class at Gulf Wars on how to make a wax-hardened leather bottle. She had also, in the past, taken a class on making a leather cup, and has made a variety of leather accouterments for her garb. Needless to say, she's my leather maven. Almost everything that I learned regarding these types of bottles came from her, or trial and error (mostly error).

If you like how your bottle turns out, you should thank Sofya. If I do something wrong in the teaching, the assumption should be that I misremembered what she taught me, or just plain screwed up.

DISCLAIMER 2: I have yet to find any documentable evidence that bottles like this were period to the SCA. The only thing that I've seen are ceramic bottles made to resemble these types of bottles, and molded bottles that have a similar shape. If anyone has evidence to support these things being used prior to 1600, please share your links in the comments. I would absolutely love to see some. Until it happens, however, please assume that these bottles are period-esque for SCA purposes, rather than a true representation of historical items.

Molded Leather Bottle Take II - Part 3

The back turned out exactly how I wanted it. Yay! It's nice and flat, and once the top piece was trimmed out, it fit perfectly into the back folds.

The flap will fold over the top, giving the bottle a triple seam.
This will help with leaking and with wear and tear.

Here's a picture of the bottom while attached to the top,
but not yet sewn.

And a picture of the bottom on its own.
You can also see the top before it's trimmed.

So now it's time to do the decoration. For this, I take the two pieces apart and put the top piece back on the mold. I wet the leather down thoroughly, but not to soaking. Then I use dental tools to impress the design. The bog find was only impressed, not tooled. You can tell that by the fact that the leather remained intact, mostly. The exception is on the back, but a stone or stick could have cut the leather some point in the last 1000 years causing that to tear away. The design, even on the back, is still whole.

The back of the bog find bottle.
See how the design is still intact?

You can see the designs are intact.
Had they been tooled (carved), the leather
wouldn't still be intact around the decorations.

This bottle is a commission for a gentle who wanted his household badge on the top of it. I wet the bottle and set to free-handing the design. 

Trying to decide if I want to add
more details to the dragonfly.

I'll add more pictures as I add the designs to the bottle. The sides and back will be impressed as I decide what to put on it. (The owner gave me some leeway on what to put, and I'd like to try something somewhat similar to the original, but I have to practice it a bit first.)

Molded Leather Bottle, Take II - Part 1

Molded Leather Bottle, Take II - Part 2

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. 

What I've been up to

Yeah, so I think I mentioned that I'm not very good at keeping up on these things, but I'm going to make another effort at it. I posted about the leather bottle that I'm working on, but figured that I'd post a few pictures of things that I've done in the past several months. Some I remembered to take pictures as I went, but others I didn't. At least you'll get to see the finished product, which sometimes is as much fun as the process, right?


The Leather Bottles

I've long had a love affair with leather, but rarely had any good ideas on what to do with it. Recently, a friend of mine learned how to make a sand-packed water bottle, and graciously offered to show me how to make one. Yay!

In general, these aren't hard to make. You cut the leather to form, decorate it, sew the two sides together with a simple saddle stitch, then soak it in water, pack it with sand, and let it dry. Wax the hell out of it, and ta-da! You have a nifty period-esque water bottle! (I say periodesque because I'm still waiting for some documentation that shows these in period. The ones that I've seen from the Mary Rose ship wreck all appear to be molded bottles due to the crisp line another stitching, which is nearly impossible to find in a sand-packed bottle. So if you find an example, please feel free to send it my way.)

Anyway, I made this bottle for my husband for Yule. It has his two early Icelandic ravens on one side and his name in runes in the other. Probably not period in any fashion, but he loves it, and it looks good when he's at events.

                        

Overall, the bottle is pretty awesome. I love the color, and the sheen is spectacular.

After I made that bottle, I was doing a bit of research into period leather bottles and found information on a molded leather bottle from around the 10th century in Ireland. You can find more information on that on an earlier post, so I won't go into detail here. Anyway, I decided to make a molded bottle, too. Here are a few pictures of that process, and the finished product.

10th Century Irish molded leather bottle

The molds that I commissioned for my bottle

The leather in the molds

The bottle top after decorations were added

The bottle bottom after decorations were added

The bottle top after sewn and waxed

The bottle bottom after sewn and waxed

I learned a lot doing this bottle, which I'm hoping to apply to the new one that I'm making as a commission. Again, that's all on the other post, so I won't get into it here.


Romanesque Book

Books are a passion of mine. There truly is no better sensation to me than handling a hard-bound book. I don't really even care what's inside it, so long as it has the look, feel, and smell that I crave. So it's no surprise that I love bookbinding. Unfortunately, of late, I haven't really had the time or the money to put into doing much. Plus, while I say that I don't care what's inside, binding blank books gets a bit dull after a while.

That being said, while doing some research on a few bits and bobs regarding books, I stumbled on an article about a little-known style of bound book from the 11th- 13th centuries. The book, a Romanesque style, is bound by sewing around leather longs individually, rather than end-to-end like books are normally sewn. This required two needles going at the same time, and yet never crossing or connecting in any way. The result is a rather loosely bound book that opens completely flat on a table. It's perfect for priests reading a mass, and for those using a book as a resource while working on something.

Because it's not a common style, when it was first found around a hundred years ago, people assumed that it was made incorrectly. Then they found a few others bound in the same way from the same time period, but from different monasteries. Turns out the books were intentionally made this way.

Here is the Romanesque book that I made. It's on the plain side, as I didn't add any bosses or straps, but I still like it. I may add bosses at a later date just for bling, and because the truth is, in period, a book this plain wasn't likely to be made at all.

This is the sewing structure of the book. The two center sewing bits are a cross-hatch stitch that both Christopher Clarkson in "A Hitherto Unrecorded English Romanesque Book Sewing Technique" and J. A. Szirmai in "The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding" call a herringbone stitch. The outside two sewing bits are the endbands.

The book block attached to the oak boards

Here I've glued a thin linen to the spine of the book to give it a bit more stability. Clarkson stated that this was found on the two books that he examined of this style, though Szirmai intimates that it wouldn't have been done. I preferred the stability, so I followed Clarkson.

 Here are some pictures of the completed book. Like I said, it's rather plain, which wouldn't have been the case in period. But I liked it as it was, to be honest, so left it this way. Eventually, I may add some bling, but for now, it's fine. I've given it to Abbess Katherine for her circa-1200 display, anyway, so to do anything else to it, I'd have to get it back.

 

 

I'm working on a few other books at the moment which I will start a new post on once I get them sufficiently underway. One is a gift for a friend, one is a gift to the Abbess for circa-1200, and the third is a vigil book.


Sewing fun

So, I have no progression pictures of this stuff, which, since this post is already so long and photo-heavy, probably isn't a bad thing. But I liked the outfits and wanted to share.

First, my Italian Ren dress. I adapted a Period Pattern to fit my body and to be more what I liked. The fabric was bought from a friend when she was destashing, and it's perfect for this gown. After ages in the SCA, I finally have court garb! *does a happy dance*

I hand-sewed the bodice to make sure that it fit correctly, and sewed the skirt, sleeves, and lining with a machine. It's laced in the back with metal rings which will be, eventually, replaced with eyelets. For now, this is functional.

A while ago, my dear friend Tamilia asked me to make her a Norse outfit to wear to SCA events. I was slow to get it done, but I do like how it turned out once I got there. 

She looks stunning in everything she wears, but I think this style in particular suits her.

I also made an Anglo-Saxon gown for myself and tunic for my husband for our 10th anniversary vow renewal. I love this gown! It's heavy as sin, but I think it turned out well. The dress was sewn entirely by machine, but my husband's tunic was mostly hand-sewn.

There are other things that I've worked on this year, but these were the big ones. I have done a good bit more brewing, which I'll probably post about in order to not lose my recipes. And there's always something new to learn, like goldwork embroidery or spinning wool. :)

Stick around. Between us, we might learn something.