For the Love of Leather

As a kid I was obsessed with making things and working with my hands. Shelves full of dozens of plastic model kits and rockets filled my room. In third grade I didn’t just mush around with playdough, I built an Egyptian diorama complete with Sphinx, pyramids and fake palm trees. My dinosaur dioramas were epic. But in the fall of 1971, sitting in a Jr High shop class, I was introduced to what would be my lifelong hobby, my art medium, my creative obsession and occasionally my primary source of income. Leather.
 

You Can Learn Something in JR High

The class met twice a week and introduced a room full of squirrelly jr high boys to different creative disciplines and shop skills…basic metal work, woodworking, and leather crafts. When we were given our first little piece of leather to mess with, I was utterly fascinated by the feel of it…it felt real, organic in my hand, the smell of it…I thought the smell of tanned cowhide was intoxicating. To this day, when I receive a side of cowhide, I sit and inhale it for the first minute when it is out of the package. The marvel of marvels leather revealed was that I could dampen it and pound on it with some funny shaped tools, and when the piece dried, the impression was still there, in the leather, in 3D relief. This was magic. I took that first piece, impressed my initials into it and stamped flowers around it. It was mine and what I did to it reflected me and my emotions at the moment and that leather would last with those feelings evident for a long, long time.
 

That first leather project, a key case kind of thing, tooled with the initials NHRA…National Hot Rod Association…representing my main Jr High obsession…drag racing….still sits on my desk and I see it every day. I took to the craft immediately and ordered the Tandy beginners leather tooling kit which had the basic tools, a few projects to complete and a beginner instruction book.  I had all the projects in the kit finished in a matter of days.
 

In the next few years I tooled and assembled handy and practical things like key cases, wallets, checkbook covers, purses, the seats for chairs, picture frames and more. I also made a lot of less useful things like comb holders, pocket protectors and way too many coasters. Everyone in the family was loaded down with every leather item that I could think of to make. And when everyone had as many wallets, purses, key cases, and checkbook covers they could use for years to come, I turned to the next logical outlet to be rid of all the stuff I was producing. I sold it. By the time I graduated in 1977, a large percentage of the high school’s pants were held up with one of my belts.
 

Its a frustrating craft

I have always been fascinated and frustrated with the difficulty of leather craft. I have painted, sculpted, done woodworking, built 100s of plastic models. Nothing is more unforgiving then a piece of leather. Your mistakes are very hard to work around or cover up. Its always a fine line between making something gorgeous and a disaster. You can have a project 95% complete and screw it up beyond repair with the last few things to do. Way more projects then I care to admit have gone into the trash because some boo-boos just are not fixable. This used to drive me crazy until I learned to practice a little ritual. I would mentally let go of the project, cut it up into little pieces and burn it with the trash (back in the bad old days when you could burn your own trash out in rural America) I still do that today when a project has gone south, only now it goes into the wood stove. I say goodbye to the fouled up piece and say hello to the next project with no real regrets, for through it I learned what not to do next time.

Leather is an endless education

Each and every piece is in some way different then the piece before it. The hide shows the scars, brands, insect bites and trauma the living critter suffered and everything, good and bad the animal lived through is there in that tanned leather.  Did the rancher not take care of flys and boring insects? There are the scars. Did the cow love to push against the barb wire to point of bleeding to get the grass in the ditch? There are the scars. Was there a particular spot the cow rubbed against the gate to scratch until the skin was raw? Ha! Found the spot in the leather.
 

Every piece of leather is different. When you have the dye steps to your color scheme all figured out for one piece of leather, the new hide you just bought doesn’t accept coloration like the last one and you have to start all over to figure out how to get that combination and “glow” you were achieving before. One piece of leather will hardly stretch and form at all, the next is too stretchy to do what you need it to do. I have done some color effects that I have never been able to exactly duplicate because the next side of leather was just different enough. The medium itself is always different and you have to adapt your work to the leather canvas you have before you. Working with leather is an endless challenge that I never, ever feel I have exactly mastered. 

Yes it's expensive to do leather art. The most expensive hide I work with is Rattlesnake, which for nice, wide, (6”) Eastern Diamond back runs 3.00 per linear inch. If you take into account the scrap and mostly unusable part of the snakeskin, its more like $4 an inch. The best part of the snake ends up being about a $100 a sq ft. Shark is $25-40 a sq ft. Alligator $70 a sq ft. Prime cut full quill ostrich $50 a sq ft. Making a goof with one of these exotic leathers is…painfully expensive. Good tooling cowhide runs $5-15 a sq ft. High quality leather is certainly not cheap.    

Now A Fulltime Job

My own deteriorating health ( severe back problems, serious hypertension, a heart attack, triple bypass,) has left me in a semi-retired state and unable to do the market gardening and small scale farming I was doing and the tv/video work before that. So 2.5 years ago, my very part time hobby became very full time. After 42 years of mostly making a few projects every year or so, I took my hobby to the level of a job, and opened The Aramadillo Leather Shop (the name of  which is a joke that often I am the only one who gets since there is no such thing as the leather of an armadillo) on Etsy. In the subsequent years I have made, and mostly sold, north of 600 items.
 

From the key case in 1971 to the hats of 2018 I have kept on the crafting path through love for making practical things, love for working with my hands and and love for the medium itself….Leather.      

"Damn my workbench is a mess" -- Armadilloman

Edited to add:  You can check out my Steem and Steemit themed leather items HERE.