Entropic Thunder
New in Town
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Does anyone even read posts that aren’t written by the regular folks? I’ve written several posts in detail so far on this thread describing how exactly to stretch or shrink leather, and even a bit of the science behind why certain leather will stretch and some won’t, and none of the posts have even been acknowledged? Is anyone seeing these messages or is the input simply not welcome here?
Simply put: the arrogant guy is actually not wrong, leather does factually stretch. When you break a new jacket in and it softens up, there is also some degree of stretching that takes place as the elbow bags on a well worn in jacket will clearly show. If you’ve ever seen a shoe being made it is very clearly stretched over the last to achieve the shape of the shoe. Likewise take a pair of shoes 1/2 to 1 1/2 sizes too small to any decent cobbler and they’ll pretty easily stretch them out to fit for you, so long as it’s a decent quality shoe, they just wet it down and put a shoe stretcher in there. Leather belts can commonly stretch up to several inches if the maker doesn’t either interline the belt with nylon or some other non stretch fabric for cheaper belts, or simply pull all the stretch out of the belt before it goes out the door, which is an extremely common practice in belt making. Likewise leather straps on bags are almost always interlined with mom stretch fabric otherwise they will invariably stretch. It’s not any kind of secret or myth, it’s a well known characteristic of leather that it has a limited amount of stretch and or shrinkage based on the tannage and the type of hide. Leather has a fiber structure and when wet those fibers can be stretched like almost any other natural material. If the fibers dry in a stretched position, the fibers will be set that way and the leather will remain stretched.
Simply put: the arrogant guy is actually not wrong, leather does factually stretch. When you break a new jacket in and it softens up, there is also some degree of stretching that takes place as the elbow bags on a well worn in jacket will clearly show. If you’ve ever seen a shoe being made it is very clearly stretched over the last to achieve the shape of the shoe. Likewise take a pair of shoes 1/2 to 1 1/2 sizes too small to any decent cobbler and they’ll pretty easily stretch them out to fit for you, so long as it’s a decent quality shoe, they just wet it down and put a shoe stretcher in there. Leather belts can commonly stretch up to several inches if the maker doesn’t either interline the belt with nylon or some other non stretch fabric for cheaper belts, or simply pull all the stretch out of the belt before it goes out the door, which is an extremely common practice in belt making. Likewise leather straps on bags are almost always interlined with mom stretch fabric otherwise they will invariably stretch. It’s not any kind of secret or myth, it’s a well known characteristic of leather that it has a limited amount of stretch and or shrinkage based on the tannage and the type of hide. Leather has a fiber structure and when wet those fibers can be stretched like almost any other natural material. If the fibers dry in a stretched position, the fibers will be set that way and the leather will remain stretched.
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