Thin natural veg-tan leather beside a thick chestnut bridle leather panel, comparing a beginner leather with bridle leather.
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Why Bridle Leather Is a Hard First Leather

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis

My opinion, argued from the bench, and then argued back.

Bridle leather is a hard first leather because it was built for tack, not for learning: thick, heavy, stiff and loaded with wax, it punishes every small error a beginner makes and takes its sweet time forgiving any of them. That is the case I am going to make. I will make it straight, because English bridle is the leather my briefcases are built from, and a man taking a swing at his own material had better not cheat. Then I will spend the last third of this piece arguing against myself, because the case has a hole in it, and I know where.

Video: Hand stitch thick English bridle leather, from Marcellino NY Briefcase Maker on YouTube.

Label this one plainly: it is my view, not a rule from a guild or a tannery. Where I lean on a fact, I link the page it came from.

Bridle was made to hold a horse

Tack leather is waxed, firm and heavy, and each of those traits fights a new hand.

Hands saddle stitching a thick bridle leather seam held in the air with two needles.

Start with what the stuff is. On my Leather Choices page I describe English bridle as a finish on vegetable-tanned leather that is traditionally very waxy, thick, heavy and stiff, and takes a while to soften. The name gives the job away. The bag maker Tsuchiya Kaban, writing about bridle from J & E Sedgwick, notes it was long used for bridles and harness, and that craftspeople apply wax by hand several times over to make it last.

The American tanneries get there by a different road. Buckleguy’s page for Wickett & Craig’s bridle says the leather is drum dyed, then “hot stuffed with waxes,” and rates its temper as firm. Weaver Leather Supply sells Hermann Oak English bridle at 10 to 12 ounces for belts, pet products and tack. On my own page I put Hermann Oak at around 8 to 12 ounces, thick enough that adding a suede lining makes it thicker still. The tannery’s plain bridle, the line without the English name, is described on its Weaver listing as firmer and drier than the English kind, sold at 8 to 9 and 10 to 11 ounces for holsters, belts, reins and halters. Firm, heavy, built for a working animal, whatever the label says.

Put those together and you have a leather designed to sit on an animal in the rain and not stretch. Lovely on a horse. Less lovely at a kitchen table, where a first-timer has to fight a lot of material before a single good stitch goes in.

Learning to drive on a manual truck

You can learn on it, but every mistake stalls the engine.

The closest thing I know to starting out on bridle is learning to drive on an old manual truck with a heavy clutch. Plenty of people did it and turned out fine. They also stalled it at every light, ground the gears on every hill, and spent the first month so busy with the left foot that they never got around to looking at the road.

That is my objection in one picture. A beginner has four or five things to learn at once: cutting a straight line, punching holes that line up, pulling a stitch to the right tension, sanding and burnishing an edge. On a soft, light veg-tan, the leather gets out of the way so the hands can learn those jobs. On thick bridle, the leather is the clutch. Every cut takes more forearm. Every hole goes through more fiber. Every edge carries wax that has to be dealt with before it will finish.

I’ll leave the truck there. The point is the attention, and where it goes when the material is pushing back harder than you are.

I know the stall from the inside. I picked up leather as a hobby in 1995 and did not get paid for it until 2010, and back then there was almost nothing good to learn from. I went into stores in the city and studied how the bags were put together, read whatever books I could find, and did the rest by trial and error. Mostly error. More than once I came close to quitting, threw a bag across the room, and left it on the floor. Then I came back, because it was still lying there waiting for me, and it had not fixed itself.

What the suppliers hand a newcomer

Four to six ounces of plain vegetable-tanned leather, and small things to make.

Macro of English bridle leather showing white wax bloom beside a buffed strip and a cotton cloth.

The people who sell leather to newcomers say much the same thing. Tandy Leather’s starter guide calls vegetable-tanned leather the best choice to start, recommends something in the 4 to 6 ounce range, and names first pieces such as key chains, coasters and simple card holders. Its reasons are plain: the leather is easy to cut and punch, takes tooling and dye, and holds its shape.

Tandy’s separate guide to selecting leather by project puts belts and straps at 6 to 8 ounces and saddlery at 9 ounces and up. It also advises starting small, with test pieces, to learn how each leather cuts, punches, stitches and finishes.

Hold that against the bridle numbers above. Hermann Oak English bridle at 10 to 12 ounces sits right in the saddlery bracket, roughly twice the thickness Tandy suggests for a first piece. Same tanning family, very different weight under the knife.

The wax brings its own trouble. One buyer’s guide to leathers for first wallets lists Wickett & Craig bridle among its picks for durability, then warns that the heavy wax content makes it harder to burnish than lighter veg-tan, and that wax builds up on sandpaper and burnishing tools so they need frequent cleaning. Anyone who has picked wax out of a burnisher with a thumbnail knows how much fun that is.

The weight is the other half. In the thickest bridle I wax the needles and pull them through with pliers, and every hole gets punched and lined up before the first stitch goes in, because thick work will not sew any other way. Three layers of it where a gusset meets the body is hard on the fingers in a way no four-ounce scrap will ever be. Your thumbs find that out before your head does.

So, my opinion, stated without hedging: start on plain, thinner vegetable-tanned leather. Learn the cut, the hole and the stitch where the leather is not fighting you. Pick up bridle when your hands know what they are doing and you want to find out whether they really do.

Where my own argument runs out

Soft leather forgives, and forgiveness is not teaching.

Now the turn. I made the case. Here is where it fails me.

Soft leather forgives. That is its virtue for someone new to the bench, and it is also the trap, because a habit that never gets caught never gets fixed. A crooked hole in soft leather closes up around the thread and hides. Pull a seam too tight and it puckers a little, then settles back as if nothing happened. The hand never finds out it did anything wrong, so it keeps doing it, for years, on every piece, until somebody turns one over.

Bridle lets no mistake slide. On my page about the art of hand stitching I say a key test of hand stitching is how clean it is on both sides, and that the side nobody sees is where a weak stitch gets found out. In thick, firm bridle, that back side cannot hide. A hole that wanders stays wandered. A stitch pulled at the wrong angle sits off-line in the wax and stays there. The back of the seam is a snitch, and it talks on the inside of the case, where the owner will not look and the maker cannot stop looking.

That stiffness has a practical side too. Victor at BestLeather.org, writing about a bag he built from roughly nine-ounce Hermann Oak English bridle, says vegetable-tanned leather is “stiffer than chrome tanned leather,” and that he found the firmness helpful for hand punching, burnishing and stitching. Firm leather holds still. It does not stretch under the punch or drift under the needle, which means that once you can handle its weight, the hard leather is in one sense the easier one. That is not a small crack in my argument.

And then there is the hand itself. On the same stitching page I write that the hand is limited to how small it can get, especially with thick bridle saddlery leather. That is a hard fact about the material. The holes cannot shrink past a point, so the stitch has to be right, because it shows. I sew in the air, the work held in my hands and not pushed against a plate, and in my view thick bridle is where a pair of hands finds out what pressure means. Four ounces of soft veg-tan will never teach you that. You learn it where the leather pushes back into your palms.

What bridle gives back for the trouble

Bloom, slow softening, and a leather that keeps a record.

The hidden back side of a hand-stitched bridle leather seam showing an even row of saddle stitches.

There is one more thing soft leather will never show a beginner. In drier conditions the waxes in English bridle can bloom to the surface in a white haze. On my Leather Choices page I call that a sought-after effect that authenticates true English-style bridle, and the remedy is plain: “You buff it out with a cloth and oil conditioner.” Tsuchiya describes the same frostlike bloom on Sedgwick bridle. A newcomer who has never worked bridle sees that haze and thinks the leather is ruined. Anyone who has worked it shrugs and reaches for a cloth.

The other gift is time. Bridle takes a while to soften. Bridle from the UK arrives stiffer and waxier with a greasy top coat, and once it softens and dries it becomes similar to new American bridle, as I explain on the Leather Choices page. My opinion: that slowness is the best argument for it. A case that starts stiff and earns its softness over years is a different object from one that arrives soft. Slow is not the same as best, though, and I won’t pretend it is. My opinion: English bridle holds its wax and its gloss and takes years to break in, while American vegetable-tanned bridle fades and patinas within months and shows fingerprints less, and when I want a deep patina, I like the American. It carries some of the patience of the old saddlers’ trade, the one traced in Cordwainers and Saddlers Were Never the Same Guild.

So where does that leave the advice? Still where I put it, mostly. Learn on the softer stuff. Buy a small piece of bridle early, though, not a whole side, and sew a scrap of it every so often, so you find out what your stitches look like when the leather stops covering for you. The first few times will be ugly on the back. That is the point, the same way a cook learns more from one burned pan than from a week of nonstick. Keep the ugly scraps. Put them in a drawer and take them out a year later next to a new one, and the difference will say more about your hands than any guide can, this one included.

Every Marcellino briefcase is made by one person, as I put it on The Maker page, and English bridle is the leather named on Leather Choices. That person just told you not to start where he works. I have not settled that contradiction. I am not sure it settles.

John James Saddlers Harness Blunt Point Needles: A set of blunt-point harness needles, five sizes with five needles of each. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

Mandala Crafts 150D 0.8mm Black Flat Waxed Thread: A flat waxed polyester thread, 0.8 mm, in black, for hand sewing leather. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. A commission may be earned if you buy through this link, at no extra cost to you.

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