Finished hand-stitched bridle leather writing pad portfolio open on a wooden workbench with a legal pad inside.
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A Hand-Stitched Writing Pad Portfolio, Start to Finish

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis

Every skill a briefcase asks for, at a size that fits on a kitchen table.

A writing pad portfolio is a briefcase with the walls knocked out: two panels, a fold, a pocket, and one long run of stitching that has to hold straight from corner to corner, with nowhere for a mistake to hide, because the whole thing lies flat on a desk under somebody’s elbow every working day. I make them in English bridle leather, the same leather that goes into my cases. Said honestly, the job is two jobs. Cut a true rectangle. Stitch it so both lines run parallel, and understand that everything else on this piece hangs off those two like keys off a ring.

Video: Hand Stitched Bridle Leather Writing Pad Portfolio, from Marcellino NY Briefcase Maker on YouTube.

The pad decides every measurement

Measure the paper you will actually buy, then add leather around it.

Hands cutting a straight edge on a vegetable-tanned leather panel against a steel rule for a writing pad portfolio.

Start with the pad. The leather is only a frame for it, and you build a frame to the picture, never the picture to the frame. The sizes people carry are fixed. US Letter is 8.5 by 11 inches, legal is 8.5 by 14, and junior legal is 5 by 8, according to the US size chart at papersizes.io, which also notes that the ANSI A sheet in the ANSI/ASME Y14.1 series is the same size as Letter.

Then the trap. A pad sold as letter size often stands taller than a letter sheet. Staples lists the Ampad Gold Fibre writing pad at 8.5 by 11.75 inches, top-bound and sewn, with micro-perforated sheets. That extra three-quarters of an inch is the binding strip, and a portfolio cut to an 11-inch sheet will leave it poking out the top like a shirt tail at the end of a double shift.

My opinion: measure the pad, not the label. Put the actual pad you plan to refill with on the bench, take its width, its height and the thickness of a full one, and build around those three numbers, because a cover that fits the packaging and not the paper is a handsome piece of leather that will not close.

For a sense of how much leather a finished cover adds, look at a commercial one. Jack Georges lists its Elements letter-size writing pad cover at 9 by 12.5 by 1 inch for an 8.5 by 11 pad, with an inside file pocket, a business card holder and a pen loop. Half an inch of width and an inch and a half of height go to margins, stitching and the spine of the pad. Use that as a reference point. It is not a rule. A flat single-panel pad holder needs less; a folding portfolio with a gusset needs more.

The word portfolio already means something else on this site. The post What a Portfolio Piece Is is about a self-assigned challenge piece. This one is stationery. You write in it.

Leather and the short materials list

Thick outside, thin inside, and know what an ounce means.

Leather is sold by the ounce. One ounce is about 1/64 of an inch, as Weaver’s thickness page puts it, and Tandy’s weight chart converts that to roughly 0.4 mm per ounce, suggests 4 to 5 ounce leather for notebook covers and 1 to 2 ounce for linings, and makes a point that matters more than any single number on it: on layered work, the combined thickness of all layers matters as much as each one.

That point decides a portfolio. Stack a cover, a pocket and a pad holder at the spine and you can end up with a stiff brick that fights you every time you try to shut it. The 8.5 x 11 padfolio template set from Maker’s Leather Supply, sold through Weaver, calls for three weights in one project, 2 to 3 ounce, 4 to 5 ounce and 7 to 10 ounce. Heavy where it holds shape. Light where it folds or layers.

I build in English bridle, which on my Leather Choices page I describe as a finish that is “traditionally very waxy, thick, heavy, and stiff that takes awhile to soften.” That stiffness is why a bridle pad cover lies flat and keeps its corners. It is also why a beginner may want a softer, lighter veg-tan for the inside pieces, where the leather has to bend instead of stand up for itself.

For a first build, the list is short:

  • Vegetable-tanned leather for the cover, plus a thinner piece for the inside pocket
  • A steel rule and a sharp knife, round knife or utility blade
  • A self-healing or poly cutting surface
  • A stitch groover or wing divider
  • Stitching chisels and a mallet
  • Two harness needles and waxed thread
  • A stitching pony or clamp to hold the work

Weaver’s hand-stitching tool list covers most of that and recommends John James needles for their blunt tips and Ritza Tiger Thread, a waxed braided polyester. If the bench is bare, the older post on buying a complete leather craft tool kit is a fair place to start.

Cutting a true rectangle

The simplest shape on the bench is the one that shows every error.

Macro view of a stitch groove and evenly punched holes turning a corner on bridle leather.

I opened this piece calling the portfolio a briefcase with the walls knocked out, as if less leather meant less trouble. Here is where that line turns on me. A flat project looks like the easy one, and it is not. Curves forgive. A rectangle forgives nothing, because the eye checks every corner against the other three and every edge against the row of stitching that will run beside it for the life of the piece.

Tandy’s guide to clean cuts gives the working method. Scribe the line with an awl instead of trusting ink, then lay a steel ruler on it and press down hard. Take several light passes rather than forcing one deep stroke, and keep the blade sharp, since a dull edge drags and tears the fibers. Cut on a self-healing mat.

I do not cut to a template. I work with a steel rule and my eye, more like a sculptor than a draftsman, and that makes the first edge the whole job. A template carries the square for you. A rule only tells the truth when the edge it rides on is true.

My opinion on the order: cut one long edge first and make it dead straight, because everything else gets measured off it. Square the first short edge to that one. Then measure the width and height from those two edges, never from a corner you cut later. Check the result corner to corner. If the diagonals do not match, the piece is a parallelogram, and no amount of careful stitching will make it read as square.

Thick bridle makes all of this harder. The knife wants to lean, and a leaning blade cuts an edge that is square on the grain side and off on the flesh side, like a wall laid plumb on one face and out on the other. Hold the blade upright. Go slow. A strip shaved off the long side costs a minute. A cover cut a quarter inch short costs a cover.

Groove, punch, stitch

The stitch line is a second rectangle, and it has to sit inside the first one perfectly.

The groove comes before the holes. Weaver’s stitch groover guide says the fence is “commonly 1/8″ to 3/16″ for most leathercraft projects,” and that grooving protects thread from wear on leather that gets handled often. A writing pad gets opened every day. Pull the tool toward you in one stroke, fence tight to the edge, and do not stop partway, or the depth changes where you paused and the thread will point at the spot for as long as the piece exists. The groove follows the edge exactly. That is why the edge has to be true first.

Punch in the groove. Weaver’s hand-sewing walkthrough sets the first tine of the chisel in the last hole made so the spacing never drifts, keeps the chisel straight up and down, and works on a poly board with scrap underneath. Plan the corners before you strike. Holes that land unevenly at a corner make the turn look pinched or stretched, and the mallet does not take anything back. On thick bridle I punch and line up every hole before a needle goes near the leather. Heavy work will not stitch any other way.

Cut the thread at about four times the length of the groove, per Weaver, thread a needle on each end, and saddle stitch: both needles through every hole, from opposite sides, so the thread locks.

That is the textbook. My own part of it is narrow, and I hold it hard. I sew in the air, and as my page on the art of hand stitching says, that means “I am not pushing a needle and thread against a metal plate.” The same page admits something a beginner should hear early: hand-punched holes “tend to have slightly bigger holes because they are punched by hand.” On thick bridle a hand only gets so small. What it can do is stay even. A row of larger holes, dead even, looks better than a row of small ones that wander off the line.

The stitch itself is not hard. It is focus. Anybody can copy the motion in an afternoon; what takes years is feeling the thread, knowing through the tips of your fingers when a strand has popped somewhere inside the layers where no eye can follow it. Guitar works the same way. The fingers get sore, then they harden, and only after that do they start telling you anything. I do not sit for it, either. I stand into the work and stitch with my whole body, because a man who moves only his two hands while the rest of him sits there like a sack of flour loses the line by the second corner.

Then the test I judge by. The stitch has to be clean on both sides, and on a pad cover the inside face is the one the owner sees every time he opens it, which makes the back of the stitch the front of the job.

Where a first build goes wrong

Most of the trouble starts at the knife and finishes at the thread.

Workbench laid out with leather panels and hand stitching tools for building a writing pad portfolio.

The first failure is the one already covered: an edge that is not square, followed faithfully by a groove that is not square either. The groove is honest. It copies whatever you hand it.

Tension comes second. The Von Baer guide to sewing leather by hand warns against pulling stitches too tight because it warps the leather, and asks for the same pull on every stitch. On a flat panel that warp has nowhere to hide. The edge puckers, and the cover rocks on the desk like a table with one short leg.

The third is the needle. My hand-stitching page notes that each pass needs skill “not to puncture the thread,” which a machine never risks. Spear the thread already sitting in the hole and the stitch is weaker before you have even pulled it tight. The fourth is quieter. The same page says plainly that “unskilled hand stitching is worse to the bond than unskilled machine stitching.” A pad cover carries paper, not a load. That is exactly why it is the right place to get all four wrong first.

Weaver’s groover guide lists the errors that come before the needle: grooving too close to the edge, uneven pressure, a channel cut too deep. Practice the groove and a dozen chisel strikes on scrap from the same hide before you touch the cut panel. Scrap is cheap. The panel is not.

I learned every one of these the slow way. Leather was a hobby for me from 1995, long before anybody paid me for it, and good tutorials were thin on the ground, so the teachers were bags in city stores that I turned over and studied, and whatever books I could find. More than once a piece went across the room and stayed on the floor for a while. Then I picked it up. The leather was still there. So was the mistake.

My opinion: a first build should skip the pen loop and the card slot. Every pocket is another layer at the seam, another place where the stitch line has to stay parallel while the thickness changes under the needle. Get one flat, square, evenly stitched cover right, and add pockets on the second.

The beginner’s version and the one off my bench

The gap is not in the pattern. It is in the corners and the back side.

A padfolio, in the words of the Gallery Leather blog, “is more than just a cover for a notepad.” Its post describes one used to organize documents, notes, cards and pens for meetings and daily work. That is the job, and a first build can do it. Where it will differ from a professional piece is not the overall shape, which a template or a careful rule can get close to. It shows up in four places.

The corners give it away first: a stitch that turns a hair late, a hole crowded into the last quarter inch. The back side comes second, where the stitch runs a touch crooked because the chisel leaned. Third, the edges, square on top and rounded underneath from a knife that tipped. The fourth is time. Bridle leather softens slowly and records how it was handled, which the post on patina as a record covers better than I can here.

I make these pads; my channel has a Darwin writing pad portfolio in hand-stitched English bridle. Every Marcellino briefcase is made by one person, and on The Maker page I put it this way: “I shape it, I stitch it, I finish it.” A writing pad gets the same stitch and the same standard as a briefcase. Smaller piece, same thread, and at that size anybody willing to cut slowly can see what the standard costs.

So the walls came out and the work did not get easier. The rectangle is still the hard part. Practice never makes it easy, only slower to go wrong, and the back side keeps score either way.

Jmuiiu 7-in-1 Adjustable Leather Groover: An adjustable stitching groover for cutting a channel along the stitch line. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

FASTTOBUY Leather Stitching Pony: A desk-mounted stitching pony for holding work while sewing. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

Weaver Leather Supply Diamond Leather Stitching Chisel Set: A set of 4 mm diamond stitching chisels for punching saddle-stitch holes. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

WUTA Wing Divider: An adjustable stainless steel wing divider for marking a stitch line. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

Leather Carving Hammer Mallet: A nylon-headed mallet with a wooden handle for striking chisels. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

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).

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