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Materials used for sewing leather, including heavy weight upper thread, leather working needles, and medium weight textured leather.

Working with leather is quite easy to do, once you have an idea as to how leather differs from standard cloth. First, a bit about leather. Unlike cloth, which is composed of fibers woven or knit together in varying patterns, leather is the actual skin of the animal. Leathers can be anywhere from very thick and durable (certain types of cow leather) to as thin and stretchy as cloth. This means that what you may make using leather and how the leather works can vary greatly from type to type of leather.

For instance, thin leather can be worked very similarly to similar weight cloth, with a few differences. Some of these differences include:

1. In sewing cloth, the needle goes between individual strands, moving them out of the way. To sew leather, you actually need to puncture a hole in the skin. This means that special, leather working needles are needed. (Most machines can handle these without any problems.) You should also use special leather working needles for hand sewing, as otherwise you can break needles that are designed for cloth applications. (As cloth needles are not designed to puncture a material, just to move threads out of the way.)
2. Because you are creating holes in the material every time you make a stitch, every stitch you make weakens the leather. To avoid over-weakening the leather, it may make sense to use a longer stitch length and a thicker thread on the top of the stitch. (If you use a thicker lower thread, it can throw the tension off for machine work.)
3. Although leather can be ironed, do this gently! Generally, rather than press the seams with an iron, you will hammer them down and then glue them. Or, alternately, hide the seams with another strip of leather. Luckily, leather does not fray, so there are fewer issues with finishing than there might be for similar weight cloth.
4. To make holes in leather, you will need to cut them, rather than just use an awl to open up the fiber. If you use an awl, the leather will “gather” directly where you would normally put an eyelet or grommet, causing the eyelet or grommet to fail. This is a significant difference from cloth, where an awl is used to avoid breaking more fibers than necessary. In leather, as you are not breaking fibers (but rather piercing a hole), using an awl does not have any advantages.

Other than these differences, working with very light leather and cloth is a similar experience! For certain applications (i.e. corsetry), leather may need to be fused to a stronger cloth before using it, similar to what would be done with any other fashion material. For others, a light weight fusing may be necessary to prevent the leather from stretching.

One of the most useful properties of heavy weight leather is that warm water will cause it to become very pliable, allowing the worker to shape and sculpt it, and for the leather to retain the shape that it was sculpted into. (See the mask below.) In this case, leather can be cut prior to dipping in warm water (using an exacto knife. If you need lines to work with, trace them on the back side of the leather so that they are not seen in the finished product!), dipped into warm water, then shaped as if it was cloth. If it is then left to dry, it will harden during the drying process and maintain its shape once dry. If you need to shape again, the leather can be dipped again into warm water. The leather may deform slightly during this process, although in my opinion, it deforms less during shaping than do thermoplastics, and then handling properties are similar, although the leather needs less heat than a thermoplastic to make it pliable.Heavy weight leather can

also be used for certain applications, although generally it is not used for clothing making as it is too rigid and inflexible to be comfortable. However, heavy weight leather is invaluable in costuming, mask making, jewelry making, and handbag and shoe construction.

Heavy leather can also be dipped into boiling water to cause it to thicken and harden (this is used for armor making), or can have stencils pressed into it, and will maintain some of the shape of the stencil. An example is found in standard “summer camp” projects, where leather is dipped into warm water, then children can gently press a hard point into the leather to draw pictures, write their names, etc. Once the leather dries, it will hold these imprints, to leave a customized piece of jewelry. The same application can be used in a more sophisticated manner to create intricate patterns or marking on leather items.

In short, leather has many applications, some of which are identical to those of cloth, some of which are dramatically different. But using leather can greatly enhance certain projects, standard clothing or otherwise.

 

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