A half-stitched bridle leather panel in a stitching pony on a worn workbench, showing the slow work of learning leatherwork.
| |

How Long It Takes to Learn Leatherwork

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis

An afternoon, two years, or the rest of your life, depending on what you mean by learn.

To learn leatherwork well enough to sew a wallet takes an afternoon; to learn it well enough that a stranger pays you takes years, and nobody selling a starter kit wants to put those two numbers on the same box. I sit on both sides of that gap. I picked leather up as a hobby in 1995 and did not get paid for it until 2010, which makes me either a slow learner or an honest witness, and the answer to the question in the title turns out to depend almost entirely on which kind of learning you mean.

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

The stitch takes an afternoon

Groove, punch, two needles, pull. You can have it by dinner.

Callused hands pulling a saddle stitch tight through thick vegetable-tanned leather.

Start with the good news, because it is true. The motions of a saddle stitch are few. Weaver Leather Supply’s hand-sewing walkthrough lays the whole method out in a handful of steps: cut a guide line with a groover, punch evenly spaced holes with stitching chisels and a rawhide mallet on a poly board, thread a needle onto each end of the thread, then pass both needles through every hole in opposite directions until you reach the last one. Finish with a knot on the back, or go back over two or three holes and melt the ends.

That is the stitch. A patient adult can follow it the first day and end up with something that holds.

Weaver says beginners should start with the saddle stitch and that “Perfecting your saddle stitching technique will reward you” on every project after. Hold onto the word perfecting. Following the steps and perfecting them are different jobs, done at very different speeds.

So if the question is how long until you have made a thing out of leather with your own hands, the answer is short. Buy a small piece of vegetable-tanned leather, a couple of needles and some thread, and you will be holding a card case or a key fob before the coffee is cold. The Getting Started section is built for that stage. Plenty of people stop there, happy, and they are right to be.

The trouble starts when the card case is good enough that you want the next piece to be better.

A trade takes years

The apprenticeship standard counts time and money as part of the skill.

There is an official answer for the people who do this for a living. England’s apprenticeship standard for a bespoke saddler is set at Level 3 and runs “Typically 2 years.” The job it trains for is making saddles and bridles, often fitted to one horse’s measurements, plus repairing saddlery and other equestrian kit. Among the skills listed, an apprentice has to be able to double hand stitch and single or back stitch, and has to balance hand stitching to a high standard against time and cost.

Read that last part twice. Time and cost.

A beginner thinks the skill is getting the stitch to look right. The standard says the skill is getting it to look right fast enough that somebody can afford to pay for it. Those are two different lessons, and the second one takes far longer, because speed without accuracy is just a faster way of ruining leather.

And two years is what it takes with a workshop around you, a supervisor checking the work, and an assessor at the end. Take those away and the clock runs slower, not faster.

Look at the other end of my own trade and the time stretches further. On The Maker page I wrote that a briefcase takes “days of focused work,” and that orders have run on a lead time of six months or more because of “the speed of one pair of hands.” Speed is the last thing that comes. Accuracy has to be there first, and accuracy is slow.

Hours are the wrong clock

Ten thousand of the same hour teaches you one hour.

A practice saddle stitch seam cut open to show the thread inside the holes and one pierced strand.

Somebody always brings up ten thousand hours. The man whose research that number came from spent years trying to take it back. Anders Ericsson told Behavioral Scientist in a 2016 interview on peak performance, “We don’t think there was anything magical about 10,000 hours.” What his work did show was that top performers had piled up a great deal of practice alone, and that practice history tracked how far people got.

The kind of practice is the whole point. In his interview with Knowledge at Wharton, Ericsson said the figure was an average across a group of violinists, with wide variation, and that “it’s not just a matter of accumulating hours.” Doing more and more of the same work, he said, does not make you better. What does is concentrated time aimed at one specific weakness, ideally one a teacher has pointed out, with feedback quick enough to tell you whether you got it right.

Translate that to the bench. Sewing a hundred wallets the same way teaches you to sew one wallet a hundred times. Sewing ten, cutting the seam open after each one, and looking at what the thread did inside the holes teaches you something every time.

My hand-stitching page puts the risk plainly. A stitch can look good on the outside while the hidden layers hold future problems, and badly done hand stitching weakens the bond more than badly done machine stitching. Practice without feedback lets that kind of fault set like concrete.

Where my own argument falls apart

Ericsson says get a teacher. I never had one.

Here is the part I would leave out if I were selling a course.

Everything above points one way. Learn with a teacher, get fast feedback, aim at your weak spot, and the years shrink. I did none of that in the beginning, because there was nobody to do it with. I learned by trial and error. I went into stores in the city and studied how the bags were put together, seams, edges, the inside of a gusset, and I read whatever books I could find, because good tutorials barely existed when I started.

It was not a clean climb. More than once early on I came close to quitting. I had a bag hit the wall across the room, walked away from the bench, stayed away, and came back. Nothing about that is heroic. It is just what happens when nobody is there to tell you the edge went wrong three steps ago, not in the step you just finished.

So fifteen years between picking it up and getting paid. Some of that was the slow pace of a hobby. Part of it, if Ericsson is right, was that I was my own teacher and a poor one, finding each mistake the long way, by making it on good leather and living with it.

That cuts against the comfortable version of this post. The comfortable version says the craft simply takes as long as it takes. The honest version says some of my years were spent on lessons a decent teacher could have handed me in an afternoon. A beginner who has a teacher, a class or a maker willing to look at the work has a shorter road than I did, and should take it.

What the hands learn last

You can watch a stitch. You cannot watch a strand break inside one.

A row of small leather pieces showing stitching improving from a rough first attempt to a clean finished piece.

There is one part that no teacher shortens much. When I have had helpers at the bench, they could follow the motion of the stitch without trouble. What gave out was the fingers and the focus. Hands hurt. Their attention drifted off the seam, and once the attention goes, the stitch follows it out the door. Stitching is not hard the way a math problem is hard. It is hard the way standing still and paying attention for a long time is hard.

The real skill is in the feel. Enough years with a needle and you know when a strand of thread has popped inside the layers, before there is anything on the surface to see. My hand-stitching page explains why that matters: every needle has to enter a hole that already holds thread, and it takes skill not to pierce it. A speared thread looks fine and is half a stitch.

I compare it to guitar. You practice until the fingertips callus and the chords stop buzzing, and nobody can do that part for you. Watching someone else play does not put the callus on your hands.

The body learns too, not just the fingers. I stitch with my whole body, and I have had helpers who sat hunched and moved only their fingers stand up and work with the piece instead. Small thing. It changes the stitch.

That is the clock that matters, and it runs in the fingers. It does not care how many videos you have watched.

Shortening the road

Practice the step you are worst at, then cut it open.

None of this means waiting fifteen years. The research and the trade standard agree on how to go faster, and both are free to follow.

Pick one skill at a time. Stitching, edges, cutting a straight line: each one deserves its own sessions, on its own scraps, aimed at the part you do badly. The Basic Techniques section breaks the trade into those separate pieces for exactly that reason.

Then make the feedback fast. Ericsson’s point about immediate feedback translates directly. Sew a short seam, cut it apart, and look at the thread inside the holes. Flip every piece and judge the back first, because on The Maker page I put it this way: “The side nobody sees is where a weak stitch gets found out.”

Find another set of eyes. A class, a local maker, a saddler, anyone further along than you who will say the edge is lumpy without dressing it up. That is the teacher I did not have, and the years I spent without one are the best argument I can make for getting one.

And count the right thing. Not hours at the bench, and not pieces finished, but mistakes you have stopped making. That list grows slowly. It never quite closes either, which may be the only reason anyone stays at a bench this long.

Lunarm Stitching Pony: A 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).

Leather Carving Hammer Mallet: A nylon-headed mallet with a wooden handle for striking chisels. 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).

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).

WORKPRO 18mm Retractable Utility Knife: An 18 mm retractable utility knife with snap-off blades. 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.

Sources

You Might Also Like

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply