Leather flask, continued.

I'm progressing on this little project and it's making me happy, so all of you get to hear about it and get proof of me learning things. Or something.

Anyway! I'd gotten my hands on a marking wheel, so I laid out one of the pieces of leather, put the pattern on top of it, and traced along with the wheel. Then I put the two pieces of leather together, got my leather awl, and drove holes.

I learned a couple of things at this point:

1. Using a marking wheel when there's anything more than a gradual curve in the seam is a giant pain in the ass.
2. I didn't use a groover, but if I did - even if only to just mark a line rather than carve out a groove - it might have helped with the above problem.
3. Alternately, just manually spacing out holes on a line I made, but that strikes me as painful.
4. Punching holes through both layers of leather worked fine on the top layer, less fine on the bottom.
5. I had a cutting board under the leather. Maybe if I had something with more give, more of the awl could have moved through and made clean holes in both layers. Maybe a wooden board of some kind? Or a thick piece of leather over a board. 
6. Make sure you keep the awl vertical at all times when punching with it.
7. Because of all the above problems combined, some holes don't line up. 
8. Cheap awls break.

So, yeah. I've got a newer better awl set on the way to me (thanks, Amazon!) and I'll be putting more holes in the leather soon. Here's a Value-Added Picture of how things looked shortly after I got going - I took a break on it yesterday evening and I was about halfway done stitching around the outside. I'm using what I think of as a two-needle figure eight stitch, because that's what my friend Alex taught me to do with leather.

Next step - finish the stitching and then go pound sand!