The quality of edges on your leather articles is a sign of true leather working craftsmanship and one of the best decorations you can ever give to the edges of your leather work articles is by using the leather edge creaser to give it a high-grade and durable edge finish.
In leather work, there’re only a few shortcuts to getting professional-looking leather articles, and the leather edge creaser is absolutely one of the easy ways to do so.
Generally, the leather edge creaser tool will nicely crown the end stitches or the edges of your leather articles with a touch of classic fine leather working and finesse. For the rest of this article, I will share with you everything I research about this simple but awesome professional leather working tool.
What’s a Leather Edge Creaser Tool?
The leather edge creaser tool is any tool used to create creases on the exposed edges of leather goods such as the inside pockets of wallets, and billfolds, bags, or the straps of leather articles such as belts, etc.
A leather edge creaser tool will be used to place a crease at the edges of the leather article or the part of the edge that’s between edge stitches and the very edge of the leather article.
This will be done to add a decorative strip(s), a professional finish to your leather work, and to firm up or compress the edges of the leather to reduce the wear often caused by water getting into the leather through its edges.
Types of Leather Edge Creaser Tools
There are a couple of tools or creasers you can use to make fine leather working edge creases. You can use:
- An adjustable edge creaser
- A wing divider
- An embossing wheel
- An electric creaser
- Bone folder
You can use all the above mentioned as leather edge creasing tools to make creases on your leather articles. Let’s take a quick look at each of them and how they work.
1. Adjustable Leather Edge Creaser
The Adjustable Leather Edge Creaser is what you’re going to regularly see being used by saddle makers, sheath makers, etc to give their work a professional cosmetic touch.
In practice, there’s a thumb screw you can use to simply adjust the creaser to your width – hence the name adjustable leather edge creaser, and then running it along the edge of the leather article you’re making. It’s going to give the edge of the work a beautiful accent pin strip.
To get more out of the adjustable leather edge creaser, you would want to case the leather you’re creasing, first, with water and just as the water starts to dry, returning to its original color, crease. With this, you’re going to get a deeper crease and a much stronger looking creases for your edges.
You can also make multiple lines – like double line edge creases on your leather by simply readjusting the width on the adjustable leather edge creaser tool.
With such a low end tool, this particular Adjustable Leather Edge Creaser from Amazon is going to give your leather works a fantastic professional finish detail.
2. Wing Divider
The wing divider is another way to put creases on the edges of your leather articles. A leather wing divider is a multipurpose tool and in addition to making crease lines, it can also be used to mark out the radius on corners, mark out stitch spacing, make perfect geometric shapes like circles or ovals, and finally, used for transferring dimensions for leather work projects in the most accurate and fastest way.
A wing divider also know as the spring divider is made up of a joint pair of pointed legs you can simply adjust to increase or decrease its span or spread.
Depending on your level of skill and how you might hold it, you can use the wing divider in either a pull or push motion in order to render a crease on leather. While creating creases can be made directly on the leather, it’s more effective when the leather slightly cased or dampened with water.
To sum up, the wing divider is great for adding single or double crease lines to the edges of leather work article by simply setting up the measurement you’d like for your wing divider to crease on your leather.
3. Embossing Wheel
The embossing wheel as the name suggests embosses beautiful designs on the edges of your leather work instead of the usual single or double lines. It’s a handheld tool that generally comprises of a handle and an interchangeable wheel.
It’s the wheels of the leather embossing tool that has the designs you can emboss on the leather. And as said before, these wheels are interchangeable – meaning you can mount and unmount different wheels with different designs for the edges of your leather work.
To use the embossing wheel, it’s very important you dampen the leather with water and with the help of a metal ruler, run the embossing wheel along the edges of the leather item pushing it down firmly to give it a nice decorative edge finish.
You can particularly achieve nice deeper impressions with your leather embossing wheel by pushing it firmly with your thumb and then rocking it back and forth as you move along the edge of your ruler.
With a steady hand and a super sturdy embossing wheel tool like this one from Amazon, you will be able to emboss the edges of your leather articles free-handedly without the need for a metal ruler.
I must add that the embossing wheel is very versatile and it’s not only limited for use on the edges of leather articles alone, but can also be used on any part of the leather you would want to emboss.
4. Electric Leather Creaser
The leather edge creaser is quite different from the other tools you would use to crease the edges of your leather articles – in the sense that, it does more than just to crease the edges of your leather articles.
Although this tools is called an electric creaser, it doesn’t only crease. What the leather edge creaser does is basically, a combination of activities that help you to create a high-grade edge that looks great and durable. So whether you would want to crease, burnish, wax, polish, or remove creases, the electric leather creaser is a really great tool.
As the name suggests, the electric leather creaser is electricity powered and what this does is to heat up the creaser nibs which is then used to create creases by gently pulling or pushing it along the edge of the leather article. The heated nibs of the electric leather creaser helps to crease the creases easily and more accurately.
The electric leather creaser often comes with a handle, a machine, and tips or nibs. To make a crease with the electric leather creaser:
- Mount the a preferred crease nip on the handle of the electric creaser.
- Connect the machine to an electric power outlet.
- Turn on the machine and depending on the type of electric creaser you have, set a required heat temperature which is often 5 or 6 (for leather) heat setting on a heat scale between 1 and 10.
- Once heated quite nicely, it can be used to create fine creases on the edges of the leather article.
Unfinished leather edges are more susceptible to wear and tear and so by using an electric leather creaser to finish up edges, it creates a barrier against abrasions and substantially elevates the quality of the project.
5. Bone Folder
The bone folder is a basic leather work tool used to basically crease leather, model, and slicker or burnish the edges of leather.
This particular type of bone folder has two parts that can be used to essentially crease the edges of the leather. The first part is the pointed edge and the second part is opposite to the pointed edge which is normally removable and ridged.
When using the pointed edge to crease, it’s essential you first dampen the leather and use a ruler as a guide. On the other hand, the second part of this type of bone folder will not require the use of a ruler – all you do is simply run the bone folder against the edge of your leather like you would do with an adjustable edge creaser and you will be able to create nice creases for your work.
Here’s a video to illustrate how the bone folder can be used