For reasons of texture and robustness, vegetable-tanned leather lends itself very well to hand-stitching, which is what I do. For millennia, it been produced using natural tannins (the word may derive from the Latin ‘tannum’ = oak bark, but some say it’s from Medieval French…….but then again, recollections may vary….). Either way, the world’s oldest surviving (vegetable-tanned) leather footwear was found in a cave in Armenia, dated to c. 5,500 years ago.

It is available in a range of thicknesses and finishes and these have an impact on how the material performs. For example, soft textured leather works incredibly well for bags or pouches where we want some ‘give’, but where you need structure for eg belts, log baskets or fishing reel covers, I’d recommend a hard leather.

I’ve divided my offerings below into Hard and Soft Leather. Hard leather tends to be 3mm to 3.5mm deep, with Soft Leather either 2mm or 3mm thickness, depending on the job in hand. I’ve ‘blind’ embossed each swatch so you can see how personalisation might look on the various samples as it varies from leather to leather. The embossing is done by hand using brass letter/numbers and a hammer.