Box stitching old leather.

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eli griggs

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A few years back, I started asking, a fellow member of the same gun forum we were in, about aspects of the day to day, hunter-gatherer life style lived in the Arctic Circle, where he lives with his Inuit wife and their several children.

One of the topics I asked about was the sewing of leather garments and modern threads vs. sinew and why senew is still favored, or why modern threads are the wrong choice for working with leathers, etc.

What I learned was, modern threads cut leather, and unlike sinew, do no swell with weather changes moisture in temperature and wet environments, letting in the cold and compromising the wearer's ability to stay both dry and warm.

Thread also is generally used in long lengths, so when a stitch fails, it can cause a garment to fail by opening up a long section of the garment, etc.

Sinew, on the other hand, does shrink and swell with the weather/environment, thus keeps the cold AND the weather out, (drier), and does no cut the leather holes that are made to pass the sinew stitch through.

Lastly, being only a few inches long, if a stitch does fail, the fail in no catastrophic, as only a few stitches are opened.

I mention this because many of us that will use a leather camera cover, to protect our 'Precious', our tools, do expose these to all kinds of wet weather, snow, even wetting fog, sea spray, etc., and MAY want to consider having their camera cases and bags, of leather, restitched with sinew, which is readily available on line, to keep the wet out and minimize the time their camera(s) are being exposed to the elements.

God is in the details and, the details are what good quality is all about,so consider learning something new and useful, to give the best protection and preservation to your good camera kit.\

IMO,
Eli
 

pbromaghin

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Very interesting and informative post, Eli.
 

Donald Qualls

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That bit about sinew shrinking and swelling with changes in moisture (just as the leather does) makes very good sense. I'm not one to carry a camera in a leather everready case in pouring rain or sea spray (I try to stay out of those conditions entirely) but in North Carolina the humidity ranges from about 20% on a hot summer day in drought, to 100% for days on end when there's a hurricane remnant passing through or even just a normal rainy spring. I might have to look online for some sinew for my upcoming restitch work. Is this applied wet, for flexibility and to let it shrink into place and tighten up the seam, or dry to prevent the latter effect? How does stitching technique differ with sinew (aside from only making a dozen stitches or so per length)?
 

eli griggs

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Sinew is for sale online, and I've seen both deer and Moose material, just a few days ago, so I'll do a hunt for that site again.

Sinew is a dried product for storing (you wouldn't want rotting flesh smelling up the house) and you tear lengths of the tissue off, the dried muscle which is as best I recall, a flat, semi-opaque thing, rather 'leaf-like, wet them, to make them flexible, (I wonder if the enzymes in human saliva make a contribution to the stitching material), after you have the right sized thickness to work from.

Since this is a material that has been used world wide since man/women first started using it, I expect any of the non-technical, machine era stitching you might want to do is pretty straight forward, including box stitches, but I'll know more later and pass it on.
 

eli griggs

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No trouble at all, however, in the link below, it references bird bone needles and sinew together.

https://www.hakaimagazine.com/article-short/bird-bone-needles-and-sinew-thread/

Enjoy.

Personally, there's no reason no to use steel needles, as the come with welcoming eyes to sinew as well as other natural products.

The biggest issue is getting the lengths of the needles correct, for the short length of the sinew 'thread'.

IMO.
 
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Donald Qualls

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You need to chew on the senew first to soften it up, hard part is finding some whale bones to make the needles out of.

Doggone, you mean I'm going to have to dig up my dentures?
 
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awty

awty

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Used some self adhesive vinyl over the nearly torn flexable edges. Seem to of worked well.

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