hey guys it's me rachel so today i'm here with our first leather video and i am so super excited um i decided to pick the topic of how to cut out an inlay um because i know um i know when i first started i struggled a lot with kind of figuring out how to do it and um so i just went through basically how to cut out an inlay um with the two different couple scenarios um i do know i'll eventually touch on how to actually put together an inlay i thought about doing that in this video but i thought no i'll do that in a later one so today we're just working on uh getting the inlay you know drawn out and cut out and all of that so yeah so i'm super excited so let's go ahead and get started okay so first off let's go over our supplies to my left is a piece of rubber um you can purchase one from tandy my husband brought this home for me um and then we have a stitching groover a swivel knife a ruler a little stylus and then a box knife or any type of knife that you are comfortable cutting with okay so to start off we have our noseband which is cut out our stylus and our ruler okay so when i first started making tack um i would start to do inlays and i would just use my ruler and i would mark out um exactly how i big i wanted the inlay to be and then i would make little marks and then i would connect the dots and carry it all around but the problem is is that it kind of wasn't always even so i came up with a better way to do this okay so our first step is we are going to take our ruler and we are going to mark out about an inch um i just like to do that because it leaves me enough room to have the conchos and i'm just going to make a little mark with our stylus and i'm going to do this on each end and here we have our edge groover um there's several different types you can get i'll link the one down below that i have and you just adjust it like that turn the dial and you can change the length and the width okay so we're going to take our edge groover here and we are going to go along the sides of our noseband starting at that one inch point that we marked and we're just going to go and carry it along and the edge groover itself will kind of bring up some of the leather as you can see and then we're just going to do this on both sides this way this is going to mark out our inlay and we will have perfect edges okay so now we're going to take our ruler and we are going to connect the dots basically or the ends of our little groove that we made and this will make the end of our inlay okay so our next step since we're going to be using a swivel knife i'm going to go ahead and case our leather or get it wet okay so on with our swivel knife we are going to basically trace the line that we made with our edge groover and go down and around and this is basically just going to make it easier when we go to cut out we're all going to have that groove that's going to make sure that our blade stays in that spot now you can still mess it up but this is just going to help trust me i've messed up plenty of nosebands i can attest to that then we're going to go ahead and just draw the line straight down to connect the both sides and we can continue on the other side alrighty so the next step is we are going to cut it out so i'm going to place my nose band on the piece of rubber here and then this is the knife that i prefer to use i prefer to use a box knife a lot of people prefer to use a round knife but this is just what i'm comfortable with and now i'm just going to take my knife and i'm just going to cut along the lines and you can see we got a nice clean cut and so i'm just cutting it out as you can see this specific style has um curves so i'm just dragging the knife down and then going around that way i'm sure to get the curve exactly right and so now i'm just cutting around and getting the inlay cut out and then it's done okay so our next um scenario is going to be if you have something tooled in the middle to the side whatever um we're going to start the same way we're going to take our ruler and we're going to go ahead and mark the one inch point on either side okay and now we're going to take our stitching groover just like what we did on the other one we're going to take it from the point that we marked all the way up into the point of the design and then i'm going to go ahead and carry it on over to the other side i decided to take this up to the top of this design which is in this case an aztec symbol um and so i'm just going to go ahead again and carry this down all the way into the point you can see where i kind of went off track but it's okay it's not permanent okay and then just as we did with the other one we're going to go ahead and take our ruler and we're going to mark from point to point on either side that way finishing off our inlay now we have both sides cut out so we're going to go ahead like we did with the last one and take our swivel knife and go ahead and mark along the edges so then next we can cut with our knife now there's a couple of options you can do here if i didn't carry this all the way up i could have just left some more leather around the aztec symbol but what i want to do is i want to go ahead and cut out so the aztec symbol is laying on the inlay okay and so now it's time to mark out the symbol um i know i already went ahead and tooled this out but i'm going to go ahead and take the swivel knife and i'm going to mark along here and it's just going to make it that much easier to cut um we already have some depth um from the tooling um and then this is just going to go ahead and help our knife to be able to cut it a lot more cleaner and then i'm just going to go ahead and carry it down the edge or the side i should say and i'm going to go ahead and continue and do it on the other side here and now we're done marking out our design so on to the next step we're going to go ahead and cut them out and what i do is like on a straight line design like this i just carry the cut out and as you can see it gets it nice and perfect and straight then i just go ahead and continue cutting out the rest of my inlay and now you can see our design is cut out and our inlay is cut out as well okay now you can see we have our one side cut out and everything is nice and straight and now we have both and here are our two nose bands inlays cut out and ready for the next part which will be to condition them and then we're going to go ahead and paint and die so what do you guys think was it pretty straightforward let me know in the comments below what you guys thought and also any suggestions that you have for another video is there a certain skill something that you just kind of have some questions on or don't quite understand how to do ask me and again remember i'm not an expert i'm not you know i mean i've been doing this for a couple years but i don't know everything i am still learning myself and i have so much more to learn i'm just only wanting to share my knowledge with you of what i know so far um to help you on your leather making or tack making journey um so yeah if you guys again have any suggestions leave them below let me know how you like this um if you use this method um tag me and any photos of any work that you've done i would love to see it and let me know if this works for you guys so thank you guys so much and i will see you in the next video and have a great day bye and also um anna and i yes anna and i want to tell you guys to remember to enter the contest um that is in our previous video and you could win a tax set so be sure and check it out share it with your friends and again i will see you guys later bye