Leather Dice Cup

Greetings friends,

A quick project today, only took a few hours to whip up! I wanted a small leathercrafting project to do, and I figured a simple dice cup would be a lot of fun. Let's get to it!

I found a pattern on Etsy, which had the look I was going for. The cup was an ideal size; I didn't want it to be too big. I laid out the pattern onto some scrap pieces of leather I had, and cut out the pieces.

Once the pieces were cut, I beveled the edges, cut grooves, punched holes, and dyed the leather. This all goes pretty quickly, so I'm only showing pictures of the major steps. 

The dye I used was "Bordeaux" by Eco-Flo which creates a lovely rich wine/cordovan/oxblood color, my personal favorite for leather goods. Two thin coats usually does the trick for the large (skin side) areas, and multiple coats get the edges to a dark shade.

It took a few attempts to get the bottom cut out well enough for my standards, so
here you see a comparison of the color before and after dying.

The side was very easy to stitch together. I used a simple cross stitch to join them, using a rust-colored waxed thread, which matches the dye very well and generally is my go-to when using this dye. The bottom was considerably harder to stitch and as mentioned above, I had to make several bottoms to get it right. Originally I had thought that pre-punching the holes into the bottom would be the way to go, but since the spacing of the holes had to be smaller than those punched into the larger piece of leather, that wasn't possible with my normal punching tools. I found some documentation discussing stitching cups, which recommended simply grooving the bottom cap, and piercing through into that groove from the hole already present in the sides. This proved to work quite well, though I could tell that more experience will certainly improve the quality of the stitch.

When the cap was firmly attached to the bottom I noticed that due to my inexperience, it wasn't entirely even. To (crudely) remedy this, I decided to simply sand down the high spots on the cap until it rested flat on a table, and re-dyed those edges. Following some burnishing with gum trag, the edges looked pretty decent.

A coat of leather conditioner and a quick buff completed the cup. I'm pretty happy with it for my first attempt, especially since stitching on the bottom was pretty difficult!

Thanks for reading,

Juju