Laser engraving leather products can be very tricky. Here, Stonestreet Leather shares some tips on how to get started and how to get a good result. 

How to Laser Engrave a Knife Sheath

How engrave a leather knife sheath. Here, Stonestreet Leather breaks down everything it takes to setup the software, place the artwork in between stitches centered using the center engraving function on our laser engraver. 

This project came from an order on our website for the Vintage Glazed Tan knife sheath. The customer wanted to engrave their brand onto the sheath between the two vertical stitches and so that's what we are doing today. 

Normally, when you are engraving a square or rectangle object, you can just flush it up against the top right portion of the engraving platform, do some measurements and start engraving. However, with an oddly shaped item like a knife sheath, I have found that using the center engraving technique is best for placement of the design. In this video, we walk you through the hole process from start to finish so you can see how it is done first hand. 

The art for the design came to us via email and took a quick trace in Illustrator to turn into vector for the engraving. This is not always necessary but the art we received was actually a photo of the brand as opposed to the digital copy. Part of the image had a glare and so it was necessary to do a trace to get it perfect. Once we had that lined up, we were able to get started. Now that the art has been fixed the next step is to do some quick measurements of the space we will be engraving onto. In this case the customer selected the small knife sheath which means we had roughly 1.5" between the stitches to work with. This is important because we have to shrink the art to fit in that space so that we don't accidentally burn the stitches and make the project a disaster. This is explained in detail in the video below.