After completion of the hat for Rincewind, I decided we needed some representation of The Luggage that follows him. The Luggage is pretty big, but I wanted something that could be carried in stead of pulled behind us with a string. It is just much easier at cons to be able to carry things and not have to avoid hitting people with something pulled.
I was thinking about a making a wooden box, when I ran across the Mimic chest leather pattern from Leather Hub Patterns. I absolutely love their patterns, they always fit together so well and there is construction video for their patterns if needed. The leather hats (witch and wizard) where also from their patterns. So I purchased the mimic pattern and set about altering it to meet my needs. Some of the alterations were simple, like excluding the horns and eyes since they did not require any changes other than marking out what holes to not cut! Removing the teeth required reshaping the front a little bit and the tongue and the inside detail pieces were reshaped. Adding the feet were harder. The Luggage has lots of feet and they are usually represented as human like. I decided I liked the more clawed version of the mimic chest, but wanted to add at least a few more. I figured I could fit 4 more feet on the bottom pretty easily while still keeping space to hold The Luggage. However, this required pretty significant pattern modifications since the feet for the chest go up the corner sides. So I cut and made the regular foot in craft foam and then played with the pattern till the pieces fit under the chest. I do a lot of my leather pattern development and testing with craft foam. It is cheap but behaves enough like leather to give me a pretty accurate feel for how the pieces will behave.
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Modifying the leather pattern for the feet
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I have always hand punched all my leather with a hammer and a single hand punch, but this pattern has 91 pieces after adding the extra feet! I just could not get through all the punching, my hands and wrists kept hurting so we finally broke down and bought a hand press. The holes went so much faster!
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My new toy! A leather punch
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All leather finally punched!
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Once punched most of the leather required staining. The staining was multilayered to give the leather some texture. The base layer was a very light yellowy brown which I put on with 2 thick coats to get a consistent color. This was then overlaid with a dark brown stain which was streaked on with a brush to give some texture.
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Staining the leather
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Next came construction. First I did the feet. You can see the standard feet in the back of this image and the new ones I designed for under the chest in the front. The new ones are shorter and don't have that upper cuff for attachment at the corners.
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| feet! |
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Lid
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Some pieces of the construction were really simple, like the top of the chest. Other parts were pretty tricky, such as the corners and the feet attachment. There were several times that I resorted to a flashlight to see what was going on between the layers when holes did not perfectly line up. While I often dont need them, I am so thankful for the video for this project. There were some unique tricks to getting this pattern together. The video is very clear and made it so much easier to figure out what exactly was going on during construction. This project took me about 3.5 months, but I am happy with the result!
