Amazon Belt

The natural materials and unfinished edges in this Amazon belt were designed to give the piece an earthy, primal feel with an interesting variety of textures.

Materials needed: Leather remnant scraps (natural colors) and rabbit fur.  For this particular look, I used soft, thick, and crinkled pieces of leather.

Materials, continued: Leather cement (EcoWeld), q-tips, clasp rivet (antique brass), scissors, rivet tool, 17 cap rivets (antique brass), leather hole punch, thread, needles, sew on Velcro, hammer or mallet, and clips.  Not pictured and optional: sewing machine with leather needles; dress form; artificial sinew, beads, and coin for decoration.

I assembled leather remnants and chose my color scheme (black, dark brown, and tan.)  I selected long pieces that had an unfinished look and loosely wrapped the pieces around my waist to see which ones would best fit together aesthetically (shown on dress form.)  There are three basic layers of leather: the bottom pieces (tan), a middle layer (dark brown pieces) and the top of the belt (black pieces.)  Due to the way the layers overlap, the bottom layer will need to be made of your largest pieces of leather and the top layer will need to be the most narrow pieces.

Next, I clipped a piece of each of the bottom two layers together and used my sewing machine with a leather needle to stitch them in place.  My particular machine worked fine with this soft type of leather, but you will have to determine whether your machine is suitable or whether you should hand stitch.

The first two pieces after stitching are shown below.

Next, I positioned the thinner strip of black leather at the top.  I used the leather punch to punch holes through the layers and then loosely attached the pieces with the cap rivets (I didn't hammer them down at this point.)  See instructions further down for rivet placement.

I continued to build the belt horizontally by attaching additional pieces of leather, starting with the bottom tan layer and building up.  I used the scissors along the way to trim as needed.  As you can see on the bottom layer pictured below, I positioned all of my stitching to be covered by other layers so it will not show on the final piece.

Once the bottom pieces were attached, I stitched the middle dark brown layer over top, again, being mindful of my stitching placement.

Next, I attached another black piece to the top.  To help with equal positioning of the rivets, I cut a small piece of paper the length I wanted between each rivet (from center to center) to use while punching the holes.

I continued attaching the remaining pieces of leather in the same fashion until all my selected pieces were secured together. I wrapped the belt around my waist again and marked the leather where I wanted to attach the ends together with Velcro.  I stitched the coarse side of the Velcro to the top side of the belt in the desired location using the sewing machine.

On the opposite end, I removed a few of the cap rivets and stitched the soft side of the Velcro to the underside of the belt, as shown in the two photos below.  Then I reattached the black piece of leather using the cap rivets.  [Note: I ended up needing to tighten the belt further, so you may notice later that I added another piece of Velcro to the final piece to compensate for that.]

I used scissors to shape and roughen up edges of the leather that looked too neatly cut to give it a more rustic, primitive look.

I wrapped the belt back around my waist and positioned a couple of scraps of rabbit fur to hang down beneath the leather.  I roughly stitched the fur to the bottom layer of leather (tan) by hand using needle and thread, being careful to position all of the stitches so they would be hidden underneath the dark brown or black layers.

Once all the stitching was completed, I applied leather cement between each set of rivets to further secure the layers.  Then I used the rivet tool to hammer the rivets in place.

For additional decoration, I strung some natural looking beads and a coin using artificial sinew, wrapped the sinew around one of the rivets, and then hammered the rivet down.  The beads I used were made of wood, metal, and bone.

Although the Velcro does most of the work in securing the belt, I needed to secure the very end to prevent it from sticking out.  I punched a hole on the bottom part and screwed in a clasp rivet (far left.)  Then I punched a larger hole on the top piece and snipped a keyhole shape using the scissors.

This helps to hold the end of the leather down, as shown below.

That’s it!