How do you raise the grain of leather?

Answer 1

If you are working with vegetable tanned leather you can use a technique known as boarding leather.

It is a technique that will use 2-3 passes across your work by folding the leather on one end and roll that fold to the other end. One pass left to right will raise the grain and look like lines across the leather.

The more you repeat this the more raised the grain looks and the more supple the leather gets.

You can now use the same technique from top to bottom. This will change the grain and give you more of a grid pattern. Finally you can repeat this technique and go at a diagonal from top left to bottom right. This will give you sort of a diamond pattern and is my favorite.