Making tassels is fun to do. It’s a great and creative way to use all of the small pieces of leather that remain after making leather bags. Every tassel can be made differently, not only in color of leather or in size, but also in shape. You also can combine different kinds of leather, as you can see in the first photo of this blog
A few weeks ago, after an afternoon of cutting tassels for a custom order, I had more than twenty pre cut tassels in bright colors lying in front of me. I really like making tassels, but cutting al those separate fringes can be pretty tiresome. I tried a stamping cutter ( a single blade), but that turned out to be a little unpractical to stamp hundreds of cuts in leather for just a few tassels. Actually it was only useful for the smaller tassels and thin leather. I exclaimed to my husband ‘Can’t you make a cutter for my tassels?” I showed him how I cut my tassels by hand and he got to work!
Since I already had a “knee lever press” to cut out my leather hearts, this press could also be of use to cut out tassels. My husband made a cutter out of single blades and aluminum to hold the knifes at the desired distance.
The first prototype we made had to many cutting blades in a row: the press did not have enough power to cut through the leather. The the second cutter, with less blades, worked surprisingly well. The only puzzle was how to reposition the cutter each time (only 6 cm in width). For a tassel I need pieces with fringes of 20-25 cm. So after each press, we had to replace the cutter again for a new series of cuts. After a few attempts, we finally calculated the right distance. After that it was easy to place the second and following series of cuts in the right place. You can see the little marks I made on the leather when I reposition the cutter for every next cut we made with the press.
The first photo in this blog is showing the tassels I made with my new cutter. This new collection of FUR tassels are available in my shop
