Hand me my leather…

Posted on Leather, Uncategorized

I finished cutting out and punching the stitching holes for my Ladie’s Purse from 46 Leatherwork Projects. I’m learning a few things about working with leather…

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  • It’s frustratingly stretchy and smooshy, which makes it hard to trace the patterns and hard to cut them out reliably, though I’m hoping this will make it more forgiving once I start stitching the whole thing together.
  • The leather marking pens I got from Tandy may be just a little optimistic when they say the marks rub off easily with your fingers. It comes off if you do this quickly enough, and they’re coming off, but it’s also exposing how much this leather could stand to be cleaned, so that’s my next step.
  • Having now punched in all the holes one at a time, with a punch and a mallet, I can say working with leather is very therapeutic for days when your president* has once again been talking total racist garbage and you have some anger with no reasonable outlet.
  • The deertanned cowhide leather I’m using, from a remnants box, is actually pretty easy to cut with the cheap leather scissors I picked up from Tandy. And because it’s remnants, I think the whole box cost me like $12, which is good, because if it doesn’t come out great I won’t be too broken-hearted.
  • Speaking of which, I am SUPER glad I picked a more basic project that I can do with cheap remnants, because I know this whole thing is going to teach me a lot for future projects, which will inevitably cost a lot more due to the price of leather hides of sufficient size.
  • Leather just smells really good. Like really really good.
  • I wanted to stick closely to the pattern as printed, but this also means punching the holes one by one. I think next time, I might use one of my multi-pronged punches and adjust the pattern accordingly, though this might fuck things up when it comes time to sewing things together. Of course, with the way the pattern tends to shift when I’m marking the holes with the awl, I’m pretty sure they’re not perfect now, anyhow. I figure maybe if I lay the pieces on top of the piece they’ll attach to and punch them together, that might solve the problem, but we’ll see.