you are my sunshine

On Friday I had my leather workshop which everyone in our class needed to do and be signed off for on health and safety before we can make our shoes. There are 6 machines we were shown but only 5 we were inducted on as one of them the lecturer said we would only use if we take fashion accessories next year as its quite a dangerous machine to use unless you are used to it. The first machines we looked at were twin needle machines which basically as suggested in the name unlike sewing machines which only have one needle have two, these machines make a stitch seen on jeans fabric on the seams. The leather needles are alot stronger than normal sewing needles and so when passing the fabric underneath the needles/foot you have to make sure your hands are either side of the fabric, as these machines are used for joining several layers of leather together. There were two types of machines for many of the leather machines one looked like a normal sewing machine, as in it was a regular set up where the fabric goes flat under the needle and would be used for a flat piece of leather before the shoe was constructed and then the other machine could be used when the shoe was constructed and the needle and foot sat up higher. As seen above on the samples we tried out many of the machines and saw the different stitches and how they worked and started to look at what would be most suitable for our shoes when we come to make them. The machine we were shown but not inducted on was a leather machine that has a knife in and is used to cut off a thin layer of the leather so that it makes it more manageable to sew a seam and the seam to lie flat as theres not so much bulk. The settings can be adjusted to take more or less leather off of this layer and also in the laser cutting room there is a huge one of these machines which can be used to cut an entire hide in half, doubling your fabric. i found the leather workshops extremely interesting as the machines and there functions/set up were explained indepth and by doing the inductions before our shoe workshops it gave us time to look at the machines and decide which stitches we can achieve on our shoes and also meant that we will have more time in our workshops to get on and make them.