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Help with hiding stitch holes

Dover

Active Member
I recently purchased an 80's vintage Saddlery A2 jacket for my son. The jacket is goatskin and IMHO quite a
nice jacket for less than $100. The jacket does have some stitch holes where a squadron patch was removed.
My question: is there a way to hide or obscure the stitch holes short of adding another patch over them?
Thanks for the help!
 

B-Man2

Well-Known Member
Dover
Stitch holes are something that most of us have had to deal with at one point or another. The best solutions for dealing with them still fall short of completely hiding them. I've seen skilled craftsman attempt to use a light filler and smooth the punctured leather lightly back into the holes . A tedious and time consuming effort at best. If it were my jacket I would try to smooth the punctures back into the hole as best as possible and try to use a marker that matches the color of the jacket to lightly color the raw leather around the whole to match the jacket color. Others will have their own methods for dealing with this problem so review them and pick out the method that will work for you.
Good Luck
Cheers
B-Man2
 

Skip

Well-Known Member
s-l1600.jpg
Maverickson, who is a member here, repaired an F.O m422a which is currently for sale. The leather around collar hook stitch holes had weakened and given way. He unstitched the collar and lining and glued in a piece of goat offcut, waited for the glue to set and then hand restitched the collar hook through the original holes. I would never have thought of doing this, but He makes and repairs jackets all the time so has the kit and the know how. Obviously you're not restitching the holes, but if you can't live with the holes and have time, you could do a similar thing by glueing in a piece of leather and then pressing the area to minimise the holes. That along with what B-man2 advised might minimise it somewhat. Be cheaper for you to do it, and may not be worth it to second it out, but If you'd prefer to get Mavericksons opinion on it pm me and I'll drop you his details, he's in the States. You could try PM'ing him but I haven't seen him around here for sometime so not sure if he pops in much.

pic above is the stitch hole repair, and you'd never know their was a problem in the first place.
 

dmar836

Well-Known Member
Dave(Maverickson) does good work. I think I would either attempt to moisturize the jacket in hopes of swelling the fibers a bit or just leave it alone. This is very common, as you know, on WWII A-2s. Perhaps this was not just an enthusiast jacket w/fantasy patch but was, who knows, an A-10 pilot's jacket. Just saying, it's part of the history of the jacket and likely makes it have more of a "been there" look.
Things like Bickmore Leather Conditioner(Bick 4) would rub down into the stitch holes and with multiple applications might swell the area up a bit which you could then planish down a bit to close the holes. Worth a try on an inexpensive jacket and quite unlikely to do any harm.
JMO,
Dave
 

Silver Surfer

Well-Known Member
yeah wet the stitch holes and knead the area where the stitch holes are. do it again. let it dry completely. purchase acrylic tube paints. depending on the color match, you may need black, raw umber, burn umber, burnt sienna, yellow ocher. no need to buy high end paints. purchase a small [no 1, or 2 pointy tip] able brush. mix the color as needed, and dab into the holes. press the excess into the hole and wipe off any overage. repeat as needed. the paint has enough body to fill the holes, but may need 2-3 applications to make the hole and indention disappear. generally, the paint drys matte on leather surfaces, so ya may want to go over the paint with a semi gloss or gloss coat if needed. after many many years of experimenting and struggling with the leather jacket hole probs, this is now my go to solution. oh, the other thing you will need is patience. if ya do this, be sure to post your results. wtf???why are there lines through this? dunno, it just happened.
 

B-Man2

Well-Known Member
Just one more thought..........You paid less than $100. for the jacket.
Unless you do the job yourself , you're looking at somewhere around that number to do the repairs.
 

Tenfifteen

Member
I have a quick and radical method to hide the stitch holes.................. sewing something over..... ^^
Seriously, I've tried some kind of tricks like above, it's a very long and painfull job and I was not good enough to do this effectively, I don't bother anymore with that. But my jacket are far from being collectors !
 

Garylafortuna

Well-Known Member
Must have been three or four years ago a former member (a2jacketpatchas) posted a how to on closing stitch holes that looked pretty decent. Try a search on eliminating stitch holes under his name.
 

zoomer

Well-Known Member
I had needle holes, from buttons I moved, on a steer A-1. I didn't get rid of them totally but made it look pretty presentable (altho they can't be seen when closed). Here's what I did.

1. Filled the holes with Barge Cement on a toothpick. Let dry.
2. Painted over with acrylic craft paint mixed to match the jacket color. Went a dot at a time - no big patches.
3. IIRC, did a fair bit of rubbing in with a corner of damp cloth while the paint was wet, to blend.

I'll try and get pix of the results. This was to make a windflap, so I also moved the waist snap panel, and pieced in part of an old cowhide key wallet next to it.
 
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