Molding a Leather Handbag

We just stitched a new leather purse---

This one is a little smaller than the first one 

(I got as a Christmas gift)

and it's shaped a little different....

So I thought I 'd share some photos of the whole process starting with molding the leather...

Above is a photo of the wood mold my husband made --

you can see a bit of a gap between the two pieces to allow for the thickness of the leather.

The leather piece is cut to fit the general shape and size-- enough to go down around the sides of the wood mold with quite a bit extra...

(this you can see better in photos further down...)

The leather is then thoroughly soaked in water and it becomes very pliable and soft...

The top edge of the leather and mold are lined up and then the leather is tacked down on each side...

Here you can see how much extra leather there is as it wraps down around the side.... 

Using a razor knife he's cutting out around the corners and bends...this is the same idea as clipping your corners when you sew.  The notches allow the leather to bend and flex around the corners better....

This part takes time and patience.  You have to keep working the leather around the mold cutting a little bit at a time to make sure that when you clamp on the top wooden piece of the mold you don't get folds and wrinkles in the leather.

Once all the corners have been clipped, the top part of the mold is clamped down around the wet leather and left to dry.  Ours was dry enough to take off the mold after about a day of drying....

Here you can see the scribe line which is made with a pair of dividers.  It makes a light indention into the leather and gives you a straight line to cut by 

Using the razor knife, the excess leather is all cut away as you cut on the line scribed by the dividers.  We also wet the leather at this point and stamped our flying "V" on the bottom right corner of the bag...
I have more photos of the assembly process I'll be sharing too...