How to cover a solo saddle

I wanted to crack on with the seat. had a hold up with the kangaroo leather lace. With the stitch I'm gonna attempt you need 9 times the lace compared to the circumferance - which equates to about 12-13 meters of lace. Ordered it last week, but got an email saying they didnt have enough dark brown in stock, so I've just asked for black instead...

no point in hanging about, thought I'd get it all ready to stitch when the lace appears...

As has been said before the top leather is pretty thick, some people use whats called an Awl to pierce through the leather (basically like an americal ice pick - not the one for climbing with), however on the last seat I punched the holes through with a hand punch which seemed to work well. I will use an awl to punch through to the bottom layer.

This is where I started:-

What I did was to punch, a hole, then mark a circle, then punch a hole ....... and on and on!
Like this:-

 a good while and a cramped hand later and it looks a little something like this:-

 

trimmed close to the holes with a scalpel:-

then the underneath. I've some 1.2 mm leather to use for the bottom. I made a really high tech template to mark the hole locations:-

 

 marked onto the leather then cut out the holes.....

then damped the leather, and contact adhesived both the bottom of the pan and the back of the leather. carefully I placed the leather onto the front holes, got the to line up, then the back ones, and gently smothed the leather into the right shape...

trimmed the bottom layer to match

and then dyed the top and bottom with russett coloured dye.

 

cat that got the milk right here! its not perfectly symetrical, but its been made with my fair hands!

probably need some more dye to make it less streaky, but i'll deal with that at a later point....