Quality Leathercraft Tools are Hard to Find!

It’s been about 1.5 months since I posted about the fire. It would be an understatement to say that much has changed! House, insurance, and living arrangements aside, all in all, everything is going well. As it’s been a while, I have a lot of information to cram into one post.

Despite all that has happened, I really don’t have much to complain about. I’ve replaced a lot of my leathercraft tools, although I miss my studio terribly. I suppose that as a crafter, I’ve been somewhat spoiled. I had a dedicated crafting room with plenty of storage, great supplies, superb photography equipment, and a fantastic granite-topped workbench (a birthday gift from my wonderful husband). It was my “craft cave”, a sanctuary not unlike a man’s “man cave”. I’ve had some great luck in finding quality leathercraft tools and supplies to replace what I had, and one colossal failure!

A couple of days after the fire, I placed my Etsy shop on “vacation mode”, to freeze my listings such that I would not receive any new orders. My customers for the 5 orders I had outstanding were wonderful, all opting to wait a few extra weeks for their order rather than receiving a full refund. Thank you, ladies, endeavoring to complete your orders gave me something positive to focus on to take my mind off the disastrous fire.

My first order of business was to go to our local Tandy store and replace the essential tools. I wasn’t able to get the same sale prices on everything I had (I’d been collecting tools and supplies for over a year), so I opted to get the bare basics needed to fulfil the outstanding Etsy orders, with a few extras for personal projects afterwards.

I’ve “set up shop” so to speak, on the dining room table of our rental house. Space is limited, and I tend to clutter my supplies on my work surface, but here’s a cellphone photo of my temporary workspace in all it’s glory:

I’m hoping to buy or build a sturdier workbench in the future. Even with 2 layers of granite tile, large stamps (like my maker’s mark) bounce and leave shadow impressions. I sure do miss my old workbench!

I took the opportunity to change/upgrade some of my supplies. The Angelus brand of leather dye is preferred by the experienced leathercrafters on the leatherworker forums. Thus, I ordered some of the basic colours from turtlefeathers.net, the only supplier I could find who charged reasonable shipping to Canada (in a nutshell, USPS rocks, UPS sucks). I’ve already had the opportunity to play with the dyes and make swatches, which will make for a wonderful future post!.

I also upgraded to the Kyoshin Elle stitching awl in the smallest size, but the blade was still too big for my projects, so I went back to the cheaper Osborne Stitching Awl that I used to have.

I do have one major complaint about a tool: I can’t for the life of me source a good stitching pony. Quality leathercraft tools are hard to find!

This presents a unique opportunity for me to blog reviews for tools and supplies, as I’ve now had the opportunity to try a variety of brands within the same category. Hopefully this will help you in your quest for quality leathercraft tools! The more expensive tool/supply is surprisingly not always superior to the cheaper one.

Look forward to posts reviewing

Have a great weekend, folks!