I keep on practicing on my leather craft skills and I found a very good source for solid brass hardware for buckles and bolt snaps or the famous Tiger Thread or copper rivets. Seams look now more aligned than two weeks ago and techniques on cutting leather improved also a lot.
See images of belts, dog leads or some new IPhone5 covers I did lately.
Inspired by some great leather crafters I decided to give leather a try. Leather is such a great material in so many variations. I started to get stitches straight with a normal round awl just to find out, or better be told by Simon and Uwe that this is bullshit. Switching to the diamond shaped awl brings in another task to align the blade right. I made some progress but actually it really helped me to improve my judgement about good quality leather crafts and crap. If you actually make the experience how hard it is to master “simple looking” tasks you evaluate products differently.
My first project was to sew a dog collar for my dog, he is not too picky about stuff and a very good tester for durability. The seams hold really well so far! Then I continued to work on buckles and belts and now I did a couple of IPhone Sheaths / covers. Above you see the last one, getting better but still not in any way close to be too proud of.
I don´t own a smartphone but you can get dummies for a mold for less then 10 bucks. It´s tricky to create and to dimension the template, esp. when the leather is a thick one. Probably the most challenging thing are the curves and corners and to cut them out evenly. However you learn by your mistakes and messy results, and the goal is to develop skill by what you do. Punching holes and sewing can be meditative in some way and its nice to see something developing and done with your own hands.
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