Plaited Bracelet

A little bit ago I got a request to fix the braided part of a bracelet. Here’s the pic that I was sent:

The wanted the 4 plait part replaced and the color hopefully matched with the original color. Here’s a pic of the bracelet when it was new:

The leather on that was glazed and by that I mean it has a coating of blue on top of the grain side of leather. For me to get that color in a decent material, I would need to either get lucky and find the color at one of my local leather suppliers, dye or paint the leather.

My trip out to look for something premade, I struck out and to dye it, I really wouldn’t get that color of blue. That left me with painting as the only real option to color it. Painting and dying leather is a pain, you need to give the leather a hit of deglazer, paint/dye it, then seal it.

I picked up two colors of blue and between the two I figured I could get pretty close to the original color.

Plaited bracelet

Lucky for me the owner of the bracelet said the lighter blue straight out of the jar was what he wanted. I think the color came out pretty well after cutting the lace, doing all the strand prep and then completing the painting process.

Here’s the finished product bracelet:

In the end this is a better product as it’s a higher quality leather as I used kangaroo. Also the painted leather that should hold it’s color better than the previous glazed leather.

This was a fun project as it’s slightly outside of what I normally do.

-Louie