Recent Activity

First I want to thank all of those who have check out this blog and my store over on Etsy.  I appreciate every one of you and thank you for your time.

I wanted to take a second and talk about what has been going on for the past few weeks.  I realized that I haven't been posting that much and felt I should try and recitify that.  Ironically the reason I haven't been posting isn't due to my lack of working with leather, it is due to overabundance of working with leather as of late.  One of my items, a leather cuff, has become quite popular and I'm having a hard time keeping up with the orders.  In addition to that I have begun to get some custom orders that are taking a lot of time.  What is really exciting though is that I'm learning something new with each project.  In fact I have really cool project I'm cooking up right now that I'm going to start talking about a little bit later.  (There is also a work related reason as to my absence as well, I have been moved to another position that doesn't have as much down time and therefore I can't devote as much time to the blog as I originally was able.)  The long and the short of it is I will post as often as I am able and I will try to have at least one entry a week.

So I mentioned a few entries back that I was putting together a leather box.  Let me tell you how that turned out:

It was a disaster.

My initial idea was sound and I did a really good job putting it together up until the riveting step.  Due to the nature of the project the riveting situation wasn't ideal.  I only have the anvil and driver for riveting so I had to try and rivet at an angle and it just didn't work.  (I'm sure seasoned leather crafters cringed at that sentence.  You NEVER want to rivet at an angle.)  I did some research and found a wonderful tool that will rivet perfectly every time.  Actually I found two tools, one you can only get from an upholstry website, and the other is from Tandy.  Granted neither is cheap.  So I have yet to get these magic rivet tools.  When I do I will be happy to try my hand at my initial riveted leather box.

Initially I was content to let that be the end of it for now but I have been wanting to retry the leather box for years now.  It kept nagging at me.  One day a few weeks ago I was putting together one of my leather cuffs.  (I'll do an entry on those soon.)  I had just received some buckles and was attaching a buckle to a cuff using the saddle stitch method.  Then it hit me.  Do the box, set up in the same fashion, but instead of rivets use the saddle stitch method to keep it in place!  So I'm working on that now  I will let you know how it goes.  I'm just about to stain it.  I hope you like it!

That's all I have for today.  Thank you again!  Until next time, Happy Crafting!