Quick Leatherworking Tip: Edge Paint Applicator

When I was first learning leatherworking at my local Tandy, the store manager said he was happy to sell us the edge paint paddles and pen-style rollers to apply edge paint. "However," he said, "you can just as easily use a Q-Tip."

I tried that method, but as the cotton soaked up the edge paint, I found it would become too messy. Pieces of cotton lint would drag through the edge paint, or along the side of the leather, causing the edge paint to look sloppy even after cleaning it up.

So I bought the edge roller pens and even an edge paint machine when one was on clearance. I haven't yet used the machine; I plan to use it for shoulder straps rather than for smaller pieces. (I will likely do a review at that time.) The pens work decently well, but I found if you don't clean them immediately, you should wait until they have a decent thickness of paint in order to peel it all off. Even then, it can still take a while to completely clean it.

While watching leathercrafting videos, I noticed many of the leatherworkers were using what looked like their scratch awls to apply edge paint. It was a slow process, but they had more control.

So I tried something that I've actually found works pretty well: Remember the suggestion to use a Q-Tip? I went back to that...except I removed the cotton bud off of the stick.

I've found the Q-Tips that have the plastic sticks work the best. The cotton comes off easier, there are some small notches at the end that help hold a decent amount of edge paint, you can wipe it off easily between paint jobs, and after your edge paint dries it's really easy to peel off. So you can reuse your Q-Tip stick over and over, but if it gets bent, damaged, or accidentally thrown away, it's not a big loss.

Simply put: you don't always need fancy tools to get the job done!