Make a leather bracelet or collar with custom sizes and a generated Celtic knot decorative pattern. Use a random seed system to explore different knotwork designs.

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Basic Leather Bracelet

Cuttle Official

How to Use

1. Measure your wrist using a soft tape measure to determine the length.

   

   You can also use a piece of scrap paper, wrap it around your wrist, and then fold or mark where it meets the end.

   

   Here's a general guideline: if you measure tightly, you can can add 0.25 in to your measurement to accommodate the thickness of the leather and snap.
   
   For example, I measured my wrist circumference to be a bit under 7 inches. I round up to 7 and add a quarter inch, giving me 7.25 in. I'll put that in for length.
   
   If you're using metric, add 7 mm. For example, I measured my wrist to be 180 mm. I add 7, giving me 187 mm, so I put that in for length.
   
   

2. Adjust the width to your liking, the number of snaps will adjust based on this dimension and the size of the snap (snapSize), common snap cap sizes are 10 mm, 12.5 mm, and 15 mm.

3. The snapHole determines the size of the hole that will be cut to install the snap fastener.

4. The endExtension parameter changes how much material is added to accommodate the snap cap and to have a bit of extra material on the ends.

Assembly

There are different types of snaps and tools to install them, but here is an example of using a common, inexpensive kit with 15mm caps:

1. There are usually four parts for every set of snaps:

   

2. Insert the cap on one side of the bracelet. The cap should face the nice side of the leather:

   

3. Place the socket:

   

4. With the anvil underneath, use the die punch and a hammer it lightly to form the rivet:

   

5. When you are done It should look like this:

   

6. Now place the eyelet, notice now we are facing the engraved side of the leather:

   

7. And then place the stud, :

   

8. And once again hammer the die to shape the eyelet:

   

9. When you are done it should look like this:

   

10. And you have a bracelet!

    

    

    
    

Materials

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If you are using faux leather make sure it's made for cutting with a laser. A lot of faux leathers are made out of vinyl which is not safe for lasers. We have tried a couple of lasearable non-animal leathers:

• Jonhson Plastics Saddle Collection Leather-Like Sheets

• Houston Acrylic Lasearable Leatherette

Cutting and Engraving Settings

If you are using a Glowforge both materials cut well with the Thin Natural Leather settings. For engraving the Houston Acrylics website recommends the manual setting below, which also works well with both materials.

• Cutting: 246 speed / 71 power

• Engraving: 600 speed / 12 power / 225 Lines Per Inch
  
  

If you are using animal leather, make sure it's tanned with safe substances for laser cutting, like vegetable tanning, as some chromium tanned leathers can release toxic substances when cut with a laser cutter.

• Glowforge Natural Leather

Snaps and snap installing tools come in many forms, for the example above we used this inexpensive kit:

• Snap Fasteners Kit with Setter Base and Hollow Punch Tool

Making Of and Other Resources

If you want to dive deeper into the making of this template do check out Toby's Celtic Knotwork Series:

• Printable Coloring Activity and Companion Video - Recommended! This is a special "graph paper" that you can print and then draw your own knotwork designs. A great way to build an intuition for how the "break lines" work in the algorithm.

• Coding Series Part 1 (live stream recording, code) - In this live coding session we built the "skeleton" of the knotwork design which snake around the "break lines".

• Coding Series Part 2 (live stream recording, code) - In the second session, we finished up the basic algorithm, making the knots "weave" under or over each other and adjusting / rounding the corners appropriately.

• Celtic Knotwork (cleaned up) - Cleaned up the code and reparameterized the algorithm, making it easier to explore the design space of break lines.

• Celtic Knotwork (1999) by Andrew Glassner - this is the paper which all of the above is based on.