Time taken: 1 hour.
Materials: Blackboard chalk.
Tools: Sandpaper, cheesegrater.
Techniques: Making a mess, wrecking stuff!.
Difficulty level: Easy and fun!

I’m only posting this because it’s a different sort of weathering from the paint-based one I normally do.  This was leather, and it had to look old and dusty and worn.  The leather had got quite soft with the handling for stitching it, but it still looked quite new.

I’ve heard of all sorts of ways of weathering leather, from hanging on the washing line and beating with a file, to dragging along the beach behind a car.  These sound like lots of fun, but my stuff is either stitched or glued together and I wanted it to  survive the process!

Here’s what it needed to look like:

The black leather that most of the costume is made of still had its shiny outer coating on, so the first step was to use coarse (120) sandpaper to remove that on all the raised areas, and scuff up the surface so it lost that new shine and would hold the dust in the score marks.

The next part involved standard blackboard chalk and a cheese grater, and was quite fun if a little dusty to do:

And then it was all rubbed around and in and over with the palm of my hand until it settled in all the nooks and crannies and basically turned the whole thing grey.  I tried using a cloth for this but it lifted the dust off, and I think the slight greasiness of fingers helped it to stick to the leather.

And then repeating the same process on the skirt and voila! Dust, old, weathered looking new leather outfit!