Hawk 8

As I began digging through my leather pile to gather material, I started realizing that I was going to be scrapping the background together with pieces. My stitching is very rough, but I am expecting it to come together nicely; I'm trying to avoid the full Frankenstein look though. To avoid Buffalo Bobbing the background, I decided to use a sun pattern to give the many pieces a purpose. They'll be the last to go in, but if I wait for the rest of the design to be in place my marked center point will be gone. So I laid it out with the Sharpie on the pattern. Now once the bird is down I can just sew in pieces wrt the guides...fool proof!

Between my lunch break and the wait for my first day back to school to begin, I had some free time on my hands today. I was happy to see the base patch come to fruition, although after having to draw the whole thing with a Sharpie I can safely say this is going to be a real hassle to make out of leather. It'll be worth it though, and my hope is only to have it done before 2014…faster if at all possible.

...I got one piece cut out, and it took my whole lunch break to do it. I think 'll need a better method if I'm going to finish before Christmas.

Just curious why you don't tool out your design on a single piece of leather?

Enjoy watching your progress, keep at it!

I've sewn a few of the pieces to the cloth piece, it's starting to take shape. As it looks right now, I'm not too crazy about it...but the only way to know how it will really look is to finish it.

I'm hoping to use at least three different types of leather, to create some depth. Also I don't have the equipment for leather tooling so I'm limited to what I can sew. Thanks for checking it out, I'm very anxious to put up a final product!

The bird is on its way to complete now. Over the weekend I hope to put in the feathers, and then I'll have to make the hard choice regarding head and feet material. Once that's out of the way, it'll be on to the background, which I've decided will not be alternating dark and light. I really don't like that design on paper, and I don't want to waste time on it in the hopes that I will maybe like it in leather. Instead I'm going to use the sun pattern guidelines, but the dark leather will be around the outer perimeter while perhaps progressively lighter shades are patterned in circles around the center...sort of like a skin rendition of the Gibson guitars sunburst pattern.

Now with many of the feathers down, I see the fifth and sixth feathers down from the top don't fit neatly into the array as I would want them to. The way I see it, you get as many tries as you need until it's too late, so before I finalize any of the surrounding material, I'm going to rip those seams and redo all four. Better to suffer a little now than to hate this thing every time I look at it down the road.

can we hear it run?
are you planning to lift the lowly rear?
some good stuff you have there. especially the unconcealed wiring harness

Thanks man. Yeah I'll try to put that up some time this weekend. As for the rear, yeah that's going to be the next major step, but I've got to prefab an elongated swing arm, build a custom wheel, plan for a longer brake line and find longer shocks - and I'll have to have all that lined up before I can make my move. That will be pretty much last, except for the 883-1250 conversion.

Took almost exactly a half hour. Sucks to spend the whole lunch break and not make any real progress, but I think the new location of those four feathers will look much neater when it's all wrapped up.

What seemed like an endless cycle of cutting and sewing of nightmarishly intricate pieces came to an end to yield a pretty good looking set of wings.

…And what felt like an even longer hell of fitting framing pieces closed out to make a pretty good fit as well.


The second to last step will be to run a baseball stitch perpendicular to the frame's edge inward toward the center, connecting all the frame pieces as the pieces of the outer shell. The next step will be to develop a background. As it is I think I'll be using the tops of my old Redwings to create a deeper colored ring around the inside of the frame then strips of the old USA leather jacket to put the Cavalry red over white over what material remains exposed.

...I didn't like the suede head, so I had to rip it off and make one out of black. Along with that I put the "H" on the hawk's chest.

Awesome project man! Thanks for sharing, I'll be riveted to the updates.

Thanks a bunch man, I'm glad you're into it!

Nice work, I like where you're going with it.

I like the thread title change.

Thanks...yeah I kinda thought that now that it's really taking shape, it's not just another dual sportster any more, it really is starting to have it's own identity - which is pretty exciting.

I liked the writing on the pull tabs from my boots, so I decided to work them into the framing pieces. I would have done a full ring of that boot leather, but I didn't want the frame to steal from the bird's tail at all, so I decided to alternate.

This is where it's at now -

I've also decided that I'm not going to run the baseball stitch between all the elements of this thing, but instead just through the frame pieces. There will be one more row (thin) made up entirely of the lighter colored saddle bag leather, and all the framing pieces will be b-ball stitched. The hope is that this will kill two birds, both creating depth between the image and the frame, as well as giving structural stability, since the frame is the part that will actually connect everything to the seat itself.

After the frame is done, or somewhere in the middle, I'm going to cut off this crappy head (4th one so far!) and make a new one. This will be the one, I hope, and I'm going to hollow out the eyes before I sew it down, and sew in place a small piece of this leather boot tag. I think the green eyes will be a cool way to connect to the military history behind the whole thing, and represent the Blackhawks' clarity in the night with our NVG technology...cool.