Hello everyone!
This is Gabriel from Armory Rasa, with the first installment in my series on leatherworking for cosplay. Leather can be a daunting material to get started with because it has a reputation for being both expensive and esoteric, and most of the information out there is for teaching you how to make cowboy paraphernalia. (Joy of joys.) My goal is to create a comprehensive guide focused on armor and fantasy leatherworking, one that will equip the beginning leatherworker with all of the information and skills they need for a solid foundation in the craft.
Today’s lesson will introduce you to the different types of leather and teach you how to choose the correct one for your project. This is the required reading, the jumping-off point for all my other tutorials, cuz you gotta know this stuff first.
PART I: TYPES OF LEATHER
Okay, so when you walk into the leather store you’re going to be confronted with approximately eleventy-million different options:
But broadly speaking, there are only two things you need to know the difference between: vegetable-tan (often called veg-tan) and chrome-tan. This is referring to the tanning process, not the animal it came from – it’s all going to be cowhide unless it’s specifically labeled something else.
And this is where a lot of newbies run into confusion, because veg-tan and chrome-tan are both ‘leather,’ but they feel and behave entirely differently, and there is almost zero overlap in the kinds of projects you can use them for.
This is veg-tan:
Veg-tan leather tends to be flat and stiff, with a matte, porous surface. It always comes undyed, in that distinctive pinkish-tan color. (It also smells kind of bad, in my opinion; it’s not the rich leather smell that people wax rapturous about.) When it’s dry, it behaves about the same way foam or plastic does – it’s lightweight and holds its shape, and you can bend it, but when you let go, it’s going to spring right back.
Veg-tan is the leather that can be tooled, like the example above (and many more examples to come), a process where you carve lines into the leather with a special knife and then use stamps to give it texture and depth. It’s also the leather that can be molded into three-dimensional shapes.
For most people, their experience with veg-tan is going to be belts, shoes, certain purses and bags, and small molded cases. (Or holsters and saddles, if that’s how they roll.)
For cosplayers, on the other hand, here are some of the things you’d use veg-tan for:
(All of those, by the way, started out the default pinkish-tan – there will be a later installment on how to dye veg-tan.)
Meanwhile, this is chrome-tan:
Almost everything that’s not veg-tan is going to be some variety of chrome-tan. This is what you use to make your leather pants, jackets, sofas, car seats, catsuits, dice bags, etc.
Chrome-tan leather comes in a lot more variety than veg-tan. It has the dye infused as part of the tanning process, so it already has a color when you buy it and – with very few exceptions – you cannot dye it again. Sometimes it has a shiny, almost plasticky surface, and sometimes a textured surface where you can feel the grain of the leather. It is soft and flexible, very similar to the pleather or vinyl you could buy at a fabric store, but heavier and with a more natural drape. The underside is suede – sometimes both sides are suede, if it’s been skived into multiple layers – and it has that lovely leather smell.
Chrome-tan is the upscale replacement for pleather; you cannot make armor out of it. Working with chrome-tan is more like a special type of tailoring, and not too different from working with manmade materials, except that it’s heavier and tougher, so it requires a powerful sewing machine. A regular sewing machine can manage leather in short bursts, but it puts a lot of pressure on the motor, and you do so at the risk of burning it out.
The chrome-tanning process was also not invented until the industrial revolution, so to the experienced eye it will look wildly anachronistic in your medieval/renaissance costume. Pre-modern tanning techniques for making soft leather did not produce the glossy surface that you’ll find on most chrome-tan, so for a more natural/historical look, you’ll want the subset of chrome-tan called “oil tan”:
Oil-tan tends to be exceptionally beautiful leather, but be aware that it can pool oil spots onto the things it’s left in contact with. Do not store it together with your veg-tan.
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The one exception to the chrome-tan/veg-tan dichotomy is a material called latigo that is literally both, and takes properties from each of them. It’s sturdy like veg-tan, but flexible like chrome-tan, with a waxy finish. It comes pre-dyed, and can’t be tooled or molded.
Being both strong and bendy makes latigo ideal for belts, straps, and harnesses – and accordingly, it’s a favorite for both saddle tack and bondage gear.
I keep latigo hides of a few different colors on hand because it’s very convenient to cut straps from, but unless you’re going into fetish leatherworking, latigo is not the droids you’re looking for – anything you could use latigo for, you could also use veg-tan, and veg-tan is much more versatile.
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So! To recap, the differences between veg-tan and chrome-tan:
- Veg-tan can be carved and tooled; chrome-tan won’t take indentations
- Veg-tan is not for clothes – it is way too stiff, you might as well try to make your clothes out of cardboard. Chrome-tan is your garment leather
- Veg-tan can be dyed, it soaks up color like a sponge. Chrome-tan is already colored when you get it, and it has a finish that resists absorbing new dye.
- Veg-tan can be molded into hard, three-dimensional shapes by soaking it until it is pliable, and then letting it dry in the desired shape. Chrome-tan is always, always going to stay soft and floppy. It cannot be molded or hardened, no matter if you get it wet, or try to boil it, or put it in the oven – you won’t make armor, you’ll just ruin it.
Basically, veg-tan is like the pre-modern version of plastic, with infinitely many uses, and chrome-tan is like a really heavy fabric.
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…And that is literally everything I know about chrome-tan, because it is decidedly not my wheelhouse. My specialty is armor, masks, cases, and more armor, so 95% of what I use is veg-tan. When people say ‘leatherworking,’ they’re usually talking about the things you can do with veg-tan, and everything from here on out is going to be specific to veg-tan. So if making leather catsuits is your aim, then I’m afraid I won’t be of much help.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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PART II: WEIGHTS OF LEATHER
Thickness of leather is measured by the ounce, which is confusing for the newbie, but what that means is how many ounces it weighs per square foot. It ranges from 2-3 oz at the thinnest, to about 12 oz at the heaviest. Here is a chart from Tandy’s leather-buying guide that lists the different weights:
(The outside ranges, less than 2 oz and greater than 12 oz, are generally not going to be cowhide.)
So what weights do you use for what projects?
2-4 oz is the very thinnest veg-tan, ~1 mm thick. At this weight, there is some overlap with chrome-tan in the projects you can use it for, because 2 oz veg-tan is thin and floppy enough to behave about the same way – but it’s less strong than the equivalent weight in chrome-tan, because it can tear where chrome-tan would stretch. It’s used for wallets, very small pouches and cases, and for covering journals and books. As a cosplayer, you probably won’t have much use for this stuff; you’d probably be better off using pleather.
4-5 oz is a good weight for small pouches and lightweight bracers. It can hold its shape now, but it’s still very flexible. It allows a lot of stretching when it’s wet, so it’s good for molded cases. It’s good for large hats, because anything thicker will start to get REALLY heavy on your head. (Not that I’ve made that mistake. >_>) It’s also the best weight for small, layered pieces of leather made to resemble feathers or leaves, because it’s thin but not floppy.
5-6 oz is good for straps, because it’s thin enough to be bendy, but thick enough not to get stretched out of shape, making it ideal for fetish gear and for the straps connecting your plate armor to your body. (When I buy sides of latigo for straps, I buy it in 5-7 oz.) This weight is usually too thick for small bags, but good for larger cases like quivers or backpacks. Simple masks, like the domino masks in classic superhero costumes, are done in the 4-6 oz range.
7-8 oz This is where it starts to get interesting (in my opinion) because from 7 oz and upward it’s now thick enough to do my favorite kind of tooling. You can tool leather at the lighter weights, but it won’t be very deep or vivid. Tooling is also prone to stretching thin leather in odd ways – think of it like using a rolling pin on cookie dough, it flattens and spreads it out. (And depending on how much it spreads, tooling thin leather can also change the shape of the piece, which can be troublesome.)
7-8 oz leather is good for masks, because it’s thin enough that you can still make some very dramatic shapes (necessary when molding it to fit over a face), but it’s thick enough to be rigid when it dries, and you can get some very nice deep tooling. It works for smaller pieces of armor, like bracers or headpieces, that aren’t going to have a lot of pressure put on them, and armor that’s made of a lot of layered pieces. It’s also the weight you want for wide trophy belts and the like. (Regular belts are usually 9 oz+ – heavier than trophy belts because they’re both narrower and load-bearing.)
9-10 oz: This is my jam. This is what you use for armor – pauldrons, bracers, helmets, breastplates, greaves, you name it. It’s about 4-5 mm thick, it takes beautifully deep tooling, and it’s very sturdy, with only minimal flexibility. Armor-weight veg-tan is where I live, as an artist and a human being.
And 10 oz is about the heaviest weight that’s commonly available. The only cowhide thicker than that is called sole bend, a type of veg-tan about 12-13 oz, and it’s not only thicker but also compressed to make it way more dense.
Sole bend is quite difficult to work with – you best have a bandsaw to cut it with – and it’s already so compressed that you can’t tool it, so I don’t use sole bend unless I’m making actual, functional combat armor, either for re-enactment or larping. And even then, you can get the same level of protection by riveting multiple layers of lighter leather together.
PART III: WHEN NOT TO USE LEATHER
So this is probably a good time to talk about what kind of armor you can’t use leather for.
Leather’s not good for flat planes and straight, sharp, geometric angles – anything that’s supposed to look like plates of sheet metal welded together.
Because the surface of leather isn’t level and uniform, it has a sort of organic ripple to it (because it is organic, it came off a cow), so it’s never going to be flat enough to look right. Moreover, you can’t glue the edges together to mimic welding; that’s simply not a viable way to permanently attach pieces of leather together, and they’ll fall apart in short order.
For the welded-plate look, you’re better off with EVA foam or thermoplastics – or, as I used for my own Hawke costume, squares of linoleum flooring. That was my baby’s first cosplay, and for the leather parts I used real leather, but for the “metal” I used linoleum:
Leather is also unsuitable for chrome effects:
Because that’s achieved not by the type of paint you use, but by polishing the surface of the material itself to a mirror finish. Leather is too porous, it CANNOT get that smooth, ever, it’s just not gonna happen. The closest you can come is with a clever paint job that uses contouring tricks to give the impression of high shine:
On the other hand, leather is brilliant at mimicking aged metal, particularly if it’s got a lot of intricate carving – in essence, the more design or texturing you have on the surface, the easier it is to disguise the fact that it’s leather and not actually metal:
Leather can achieve a very good hammered-metal effect just by putting an uneven texture in the surface – because then when you go to paint it, it produces a very realistic weathered and lived-in look. I’ve talked a bit about texturing before, and I’ll go into more detail about it in my installment on painting leather, but it’s really the same technique you’d use to paint any other material.
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So there you have it – chrome-tan and veg-tan and oil-tan and latigo, what they’re good for and what they’re not, and what the different weights are used for. If there’s anything that’s unclear, hit me up with an ask! This is still a work in progress.
THE END