Dooney rehab thread
- Thread starter missy_g
- Start date
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My recent new to me Dooney arrived needing some unexpected rehab. While the bag itself was fine, the strap wasn’t looking great. The first thing I did was wipe her down with a damp cloth. It removed marks like this (that I thought were scuffs) and were just dirt:
After:
The rest was just in need of edge repainting. I used Angelus acrylic leather paint and a fine brush. I wound up doing almost all of the strap’s eding and the edging on the medallion where the straps hooks to the bag on one side.
Before of the medallion
After
Strap before
After. Just doing the edging made the whole bag look blacker
Before you can see how gray the edges were
After
I did one coat, left it for a few hours, went back and realized more spots needed painting and did those. The paint dries fast enough it won’t get on stuff, but did take over night to lose the slightly sticky feeling it had. I also used it to touch up some abrasions on the strap, making sure to smooth it out thing so as not to lose the grain of the leather
After:
The rest was just in need of edge repainting. I used Angelus acrylic leather paint and a fine brush. I wound up doing almost all of the strap’s eding and the edging on the medallion where the straps hooks to the bag on one side.
Before of the medallion
After
Strap before
After. Just doing the edging made the whole bag look blacker
Before you can see how gray the edges were
After
I did one coat, left it for a few hours, went back and realized more spots needed painting and did those. The paint dries fast enough it won’t get on stuff, but did take over night to lose the slightly sticky feeling it had. I also used it to touch up some abrasions on the strap, making sure to smooth it out thing so as not to lose the grain of the leather
I dunked and reshaped a vintage AWL Equestrian bag, so it can be done on some models. That being said, I wouldn't advise it in most cases.
You can try stuffing the bag with towels and hanging it in a steamy bathroom, or stuffing it with warm towels from the dryer and letting it stand, or hang, for several days.
For square or rectangular bags, you can cut pieces of foam core board to fit inside the bag, to help maintain the shape while not in use.
Fiebings Edge Kote in brown works well for touching up the edge coat on straps. Then seal with brown resolene.
Sound like a lot of work. For vintage bags, which never had edge coating to begin with, I don't want to add anything that would substantially change the bag. If my straps aren't fuzzy I leave them alone. If they are fuzzy, I just rub some craft paint on the edge to smooth them.
I’ve used several Fiebings products, they are easy to work with. Tandy Leather also makes a product for the same purpose that has a slightly higher wax content and is more like the edge coating that you find on, say, Coach. That texture.
Adding edge coat is pretty low-effort assuming you have a reasonably steady hand. I’m buying some Tandy next week, actually, to edge a bag that never had any and could stand to have some. Good luck!
Have you tried charcoal??? Put it in a plastic tote and don’t let the charcoal touch the bag.
I have never seen a vintage Dooney that didn’t have edge coat on the straps, and I own a couple hundred.
This bag is glove leather. I use Bick 4 conditioner on glove leather and AWL.
Sorry if this has been asked before but I have a small blue pen mark on my bone colored AWL bag. Is there something I can do to remove or fade it? Or even paint over it?