Sunday, March 16, 2014

Leather flask, essentially done.

I made a thing!

Okay, so I need to get some rope and tie it on there, and I need to whittle down a stopper, but whatever. I made a bottel!

Like I said I was going to, I threw some thread up by the mouth of the bottel just to make sure it wouldn't gap apart. Nothing fancy there, and nothing weird happened.













Then I melted the cheese wax and poured it out of the wax pot, so I could melt beeswax. I ended up using two pounds of it, which seemed to be just the right amount to fill up the bottel and let it soak into the leather. Then I poured it back out, rattled a stick around in there to make sure there weren't any clumps of wax and sand, and did it again.










That's what I ended up with! The wings have no wax on them, and that's okay - I opted away from the full immersion method mostly due to available pot size as well as economy of beeswax. There's some clumping and blobbing of wax on the bottom of the bottel, but not unduly so.

Also, it seems like there's an uneven amount of wax on the sides. Like, on the surface that's not soaked in. Maybe this week I'll warm it slightly in the oven and wipe the sides down to remove it. Would that help? I think it might, but I'm not sure.

Right now though, I'm gonna let it sit, try and find some rope for it, and either repurpose a wine cork or get a dowel and shave it down, but I'm pretty much done!

Also, now I have a pot full of beeswax I can melt and make another one with, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

2 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. I'm pretty happy with it. I'm still not sure about trying to reheat it to remove the external wax; if I notice it coming off on clothing, I suspect that I'll try that.

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