Finished hand-stitched leather luggage tag with a brass buckle strap on a wooden workbench beside stitching tools.
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A Leather Luggage Tag

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis

Two pieces of leather, a window, a strap. Then a baggage belt tries to kill it.

A leather luggage tag is a small stitched envelope of vegetable-tanned leather that holds a name card behind a window and rides on a strap around a suitcase handle, and nothing else I can think of on a bench gets treated worse for its size. A briefcase gets carried. A tag gets thrown. It goes down a chute, rides a belt, gets crushed under somebody else’s hard-shell case and dragged out by its strap at the other end. That makes it a fair test of a beginner’s work, because every soft edge and loose stitch shows up fast, and a fair test of an old hand’s patience, because there’s no hiding a sloppy corner on something the size of a playing card.

Video: Make A Leather Luggage Tag // Make Along // PDF Patterns, from J.H.Leather on YouTube.

That’s J.H.Leather’s make-along, not my channel. It gets you a clean tag from a pattern. What follows is the same project with the reasons behind each step, and the one argument about tags I can’t win.

What goes on the bench

Thin leather, a sheet of plastic, a small buckle, and the stitching kit you already own.

Hands cutting the window opening of a leather luggage tag with a craft knife on a cutting mat.

Weight first. A tag isn’t a strap. It folds, it flexes, and it has to lie flat in a hand. One instruction sheet built around Craftool tools and Cova colors, Gift Idea #11 for a custom luggage tag, calls for 3 to 4 oz vegetable-tanned leather. Kits land in the same neighborhood. Weaver’s luggage tag kit gives an approximate size of 4 by 2-1/2 by 5/32 inches, not counting the strap, and comes pre-cut and pre-punched with a plastic sheet and the hardware. Tandy’s luggage tag kit runs 2.25 by 4 inches, also pre-punched, also veg-tan.

  • Leather: vegetable-tanned, 3 to 4 oz, enough for a front, a back and a strap.
  • Window: clear plastic film, cut a little smaller than the back panel.
  • Hardware: a 1/2-inch solid brass buckle, if the strap buckles.
  • Stitching: two harness needles, waxed thread, a groover, an overstitch wheel or a stitching chisel, and a pony to hold the work.
  • Glue: contact cement for the three closed edges.
  • Edges: a beveler, fine sandpaper, gum tragacanth or water, a wooden slicker.
  • Cutting: a sharp knife, a steel rule, a cutting mat, a No. 0 punch.

Weaver leaves the needle and thread out of the box and suggests Ritza Tiger thread at 0.6 mm with egg-eye harness needles. Tandy’s kit, by contrast, ships with a needle and waxed thread but tells you to buy the contact cement.

Where the leather comes from on the hide matters less here than on a case. For briefcases I only use the bend, the tight butt of the hide. The shoulder is for small parts. A tag is a small part.

Cutting the pieces and the window

Cut the window first, while the leather is flat and you can still afford to ruin it.

Make a paper or card pattern before the knife touches leather. The Craftool sheet starts there, traces it onto the grain, cuts the outline, and then rounds the ends of the strap slot with a No. 0 punch before cutting between the two holes with a craft knife. That punch-then-cut trick is worth stealing for any slot. A slot cut straight with a knife ends in two square corners, and a square corner in leather is where a tear starts.

The window comes out of one piece only. The same sheet cuts it with a filigree blade, stopping short of going through, and finishes with a craft knife. Go slow on the corners. A window is four inside corners in a row, and an inside corner is the hardest cut on the bench, because the blade wants to run past the stop and leave a nick you’ll see every time you look at the card.

Round the outside corners of the tag too. A square corner on a tag catches on every zipper pull in the hold.

My opinion: cut two windows in scrap before you cut the real one. It’s a cheap rehearsal. The real one won’t forgive you.

The plastic gets cut last, to fit between the two layers with a margin all around so the cement on the edges grips leather to leather and not leather to film. The Craftool sheet lays clear plastic over the card area at the very end, once the tag is stitched and the strap is ready.

Edges, cement and the stitch line

Three edges closed, one left open for the card. Get the order right and the rest is labor.

Macro of saddle stitches and a burnished edge along a vegetable-tanned leather luggage tag.

Finish the edges that will be hard to reach later before you close anything. Bevel the grain-side corner of the window and the open top of the card slot, sand them, wet them, and rub them with the slicker until the fibers lie down and the edge goes dark and hard under your thumbnail. The post on hand burnishing covers that stroke at length. On a tag it’s the same work in a smaller space.

Then glue. The Craftool sheet cements the three edges of the two flesh sides together and leaves the fourth open. Coat both surfaces, let the cement go tacky, and press the edges together from one end to the other in one pass, because contact cement grabs where it lands and won’t let you slide a corner back into line. Tandy’s kit tells you to buy contact cement for exactly that job.

Now the stitch line. The sheet grooves it about 1/8 inch from the edge with an adjustable groover, marks the spacing with a #6 overstitch wheel, and punches with a diamond awl before saddle stitching with waxed thread.

Punch through both layers at once, with the cement holding them still. On thick work I pre-punch and line up every hole, because thick leather won’t stitch any other way, and a tag is thin enough that you can get lazy about it. Don’t. A hole that wanders a hair inward on the front comes out a hair outward on the back, and on a tag both sides get looked at. The post on punching stitch holes in thick bridle has the reasons in detail.

Then stitch. Two needles, one thread, both pulled with the same force at every hole. I hand saddle-stitch everything. I gave up sewing machines a long time ago. On my hand stitching page I wrote that a good stitch is clean on both sides, and a tag is the smallest place that rule ever gets tested. Turn it over after every few holes. Uneven pull shows up on the back first.

Lia Griffith’s DIY leather luggage tags take a lighter road: two pieces cut to a template, stitched around the edge with embroidery floss, the knot glued between the layers, an address card slid in and a leather cord tied on with a lark’s head knot. Her pitch for them is simple: “they are easy to spot at baggage claim.” Fair enough. In my view floss is a gentler thread than this job deserves, but it gets a beginner a finished tag in an afternoon, and a finished tag teaches more than a perfect plan.

The strap is where tags die

The body of the tag survives. The thin piece holding it to the bag usually doesn’t.

Here’s the part most tag projects rush. The strap takes all the load. It wraps a handle, it gets yanked, it bends in the same spot every trip, and if it goes, the best stitching in the world rides off on someone else’s suitcase.

The Craftool sheet cuts a 1/2-inch strap, trims the ends to the pattern, punches a hole and cuts two slots, then threads the flat end through the tag’s slot and fastens it to a buckle, so the tapered end runs through the buckle around the handle. A buckle lets you take the tag off without a knife. That’s worth something.

My opinion: cut the strap from firmer leather than the body if you have it, and run the grain along the length, never across. Then bevel and burnish both edges of the strap the whole way down, because an unfinished strap edge frays where it rubs the handle, and fraying is how a strap starts to thin. On my own straps I stitch the buckles in rather than rivet them. My opinion: on a strap this narrow, a few stitches either side of the buckle do the job and leave no metal post to work loose.

The Crafty Gentleman’s handmade leather luggage tag goes the other way entirely. Two rectangles of leather 12 cm by 7 cm, an eyelet punched through both, plastic cut to match, and double-sided tape on three sides. No stitching at all. The strap is leather string, ribbon or twine through the eyelet.

I’d stitch it. That’s the whole argument of this post, and I’ll make it plainly, as my opinion: tape is a hold-it-still material, and thread is a hold-it-together one.

Now the problem with my argument.

A tag mostly doesn’t fail at the seam. It fails at the strap, or it doesn’t fail at all and gets ripped off anyway. Bailey Berg, writing in Afar, says outside tags can be torn off, damaged or removed, by accident or on purpose, and that when a bag goes missing, the people hunting for its owner look inside it. Delta’s own FAQ, quoted there, says: “We also recommend inside identification details.” So the tape-and-eyelet tag and my saddle-stitched one can end up in the same bin at the same airport. My stitching protects the tag. It doesn’t protect the trip.

What goes on the card

Enough for an airline to find you. Not enough for a stranger to find your house.

A darkened, well-used leather luggage tag strapped to the handle of a travel bag.

Travelpro’s guide on what to write on luggage tags lists a full name, a current phone number or email, and a home or return address. It suggests a secondary email for travel instead of your main one, and writing the home address on the back of the insert so it’s “hidden from casual observers.” That last bit is a good reason to make the window a little smaller than the card, so the back side stays covered.

Then make a second card for inside the bag, the way Berg suggests. The tag you stitched is the one people see. The card inside is the one that works when the tag is gone.

Afar also reports, citing SITA’s 2024 baggage report, that mishandled bags fell to 6.9 per thousand customers in 2023. Most bags get where they’re going. The tag mostly just has to survive the ride and get recognized at the belt.

Personal touches go on before you close it up. Tooling, stamped initials or dye all need the leather flat and open, which is why the Craftool sheet tools and colors the tag before the cement comes out. If you’re thinking about initials, the post on monograms covers what lettering does to a leather surface. And if the tag is going on a work bag rather than a suitcase, the briefcase packing order is the other half of the same trip.

After that, condition it once, lightly, like any natural veg-tan, and let it go. A tag doesn’t get a careful owner. It gets a belt, a chute, a dozen strangers’ hands and a spot on the handle that bends the same way every flight, and in a few years it’ll be darker and softer and scuffed in a pattern nobody planned, which is about the best thing a piece of leather can show for itself.

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).

RITZA Tiger Thread, Brown: A braided waxed polyester thread for hand-stitching leather. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

Barge All Purpose Cement, Quart: A quart of solvent-based contact cement. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

WORKPRO 18mm Retractable Utility Knife: An 18 mm retractable utility knife with snap-off blades. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

12-Inch Stainless Steel Metal Ruler with Non-Slip Cork Backing: A 12-inch stainless steel ruler with a non-slip cork back. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

Fiskars 18 x 24 Inch Self-Healing Cutting Mat: A self-healing cutting mat, 18 by 24 inches. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

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