Make a Halloween Leather Ghost

Hallowe’en is just around the corner at this time every year, and we creepy fellows at Leffler always look forward to crafting spooky leather things.

What could be spookier than a ghost? Maybe a leather ghost? Leather is the skin of dead animals, and ghosts are widely regarded to be the quasi-earthly manifestations of dead humans, so what better match of material and concept could be conceived of? It’s certainly a sinister pairing.

Making your own leather ghost couldn’t be easier, and we stock everything you need here at Leffler.

Materials required:

-         Vegetable-tanned leather

-         Knife or scissors

-         A sphere and something to put the sphere on like a cardboard tube

-         Maths

-         Water

-         Leather paint

-         Hanging D-loop

Method

Step 1 – Choose Your Sphere

If you want to make a little tiny ghost, you could use a marble or the end of a scratch awl. For a big ghost you could use a soccer ball. We used a tennis ball for our hanging ghosts. Once you’ve chosen a sphere, attach it to the top of something slightly narrower. We used a cardboard tube.

Step 2 – Select Your Leather.

It needs to be vegetable-tanned, or at the very least vegetable re-tanned, as this will enable it to be wet-molded. The thickness is largely up to you and depends on the size of the ghost you want to make. For a very small ghost you could use kangaroo at around 0.8mm thick, or for a ghost as big as your head, you’d probably want to use bovine leather up to 3mm thick. For our tennis-ball sized ghosts, we used a veg-tanned bovine belly, which is 1.3mm thick.

Step 3 – Do Your Maths & Cut Your Circle

Now we need to cut out a circle. Measure across your sphere, multiply the diameter by 3.7, and this will be the size of your circle. For example if your sphere is 60mm across, you should mark out and cut a circle of leather measuring 222mm across the diameter. Use a snap-off blade knife or leather scissors to cut your circle.

Step 4 – Wet Your Leather

Place your cut circle into water, and leave it for at least 10 minutes. Once saturated, you’ll notice bubbles stop forming. This may take much longer if you are using thicker leather. Take the leather out of the water and wipe off the surface wetness.

Step 5 – Mold Your Leather Into A Ghost

Place the circle on top of your sphere, then starting gently, pull, stretch and massage the leather down. You will notice it retains the form into which it is molded. Keep going until you are happy that the leather has turned into a stereotypical ghostly form, then tie it off loosely with a shoelace. You may need to repeat the motions multiple times, as leather will only gradually take form.

Step 6 – Dry Out The Ghost

Leave the molded ghost to dry. You can leave it outside on a sunny day to speed things up, but it may take up to 24 hours before it’s ready. Once dry, remove the shoe-lace, and your ghost should stay ghost-shaped.

Step 7 – Give Your Ghost A Face

Now use Angelus acrylic paint to decorate your ghost with a very frightening face.

Optional Step 8 – Hang Your Ghost

If you’d like to decorate your working pod area with your spooky leather ghost during the Hallowe’en festive event, you can add a hanger. We used a two-part rivet and a single hole D-loop, fixed through a possibly-fatal hole in the head.

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