Sewing

 I figured I'd talk about stitching a little bit. I've been doing this for a long time from making belts, holsters , knife sheathes to repairing shoes, bags and saddles. I've done a lot of custom carving work you name it and I've probably done it.

If you are serious about leatherwork in like you want to make money at it, you need to get a sewing machine and learn to use it. Hand stitching is a beautiful thing but you're not going to make money hand stitching. Hand stitching is necessary in shoe and saddle work and there is no getting around it, but almost anything else can be machine stitched. 

In our work time is money. A lot of people do not want to pay a lot for leather goods when they can buy the cheap China stuff. If you spend an hour hand stitching something how are you going to get that back in your price? If you have a very specialized clientele maybe, but that's not the norm. Another thing if you are doing production hand sewing it is going to wreak havoc on your hands in the long term and that I can attest to.

The hardest thing for me to learn was to machine stitch. If you don't get the right machine it can be super intimidating. Try to stitch on a machine with a clutch motor going 100 mph when you don't know what you are doing, Worse try and stitch with a 900 lbs, boot stitcher when you don't know what you're doing. Been there and done that.

If you want to step up to the next level you will need to learn to sew on a machine. If you want to stay at a hobby level then hand stitching is fine or if you have a little niche market that pays for hand stitching then great, but for most serious leather workers a good machine is a must!

Time is money, the faster you are able to put something out the higher your hourly rate is. I'm now living in Colombia where a decent monthly salary is $500 bucks. What I used to sell in the United States for a hundred bucks I might get twenty to thirty bucks for here. If I hand stitch something it would cut my profit in half!

My next blog I will go over some different machines available.