A small leather workshop with a wooden bench, tools hung on the wall, two swing-arm lamps and leather bends hanging at the back.
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Setting Up a Small Leather Workshop

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis

A leather shop is a room that keeps hides flat, light honest, fumes moving and hands busy. The square footage comes last.

A small leather workshop needs less floor than people think and more care than they plan for, because leather is a material that remembers everything the room does to it. Sun leaves a line. Damp leaves mold. A fold left a month leaves a crease that never quite comes out of a bridle bend. I’ve worked in a big shop and I’ve moved into a smaller one, by appointment, and the Maker page on this site says the Huntington workshop is closed and the next one is going up in East Setauket. So these are questions I’ve had to answer more than once. The answers lean on working makers and on the people who print the warnings on the glue can, and they’re named where they show up.

Video: Hanging Bridle Leather Bends Out in Front Workshop, from Marcellino NY Briefcase Maker on YouTube.

How much room does a leather shop really need?

Less than a garage. More wall than you think.

Bridle leather bends hanging flat from wooden wall hooks in a workshop, one half covered by an old blanket.

Floor is the wrong measure. Ask instead how long the longest piece you cut will be, and whether you can lay it flat once without folding it. A briefcase panel fits on a kitchen table. A strap cut from the length of a bend doesn’t.

The makers on the trade forums have been squeezing shops into corners for years. In a leatherworker.net thread on coping with a small workshop, a member writing as impulse described a bench made from an old boardroom table raised on bricks, with fold-up extensions hinged to it so that it became a long cutting surface in about twenty seconds. The same maker hung tools on slat-wall panels from a shop display and kept hides on a pallet that winched up toward the ceiling. Another member, Hawk Scarbrough, worked from half a bedroom on a rebuilt computer desk.

What those shops share is that they climb. Tools go on the wall, hides go overhead, and the bench stays clear for the piece in front of you.

My opinion: the smaller room was good for me. It strips out everything you were keeping because there was space for it. These days I’m building a smaller workshop again, and I still do it for the same plain reason, which is that I like making something out of nothing, and the nothing doesn’t need much room.

Where do the hides live?

Hung, rolled or flat. Never folded, never on the floor, never in the sun.

This is the question that costs money if you get it wrong. A hide is the most expensive thing in a leather shop and the easiest to ruin while it waits.

The Leather Dictionary’s entry on storing leather gives the ranges: an even temperature of 15 to 20 °C, relative humidity between 50 and 70 percent, no direct sun, good air, and nothing stored straight on a cement floor or sealed airtight, where condensation can stain it and start mold. It calls hanging the best option and says stacks should stay low, because pressure on heavily greased leather can make it heat up. Too dry turns leather brittle. Too damp grows mold.

The forums argue about the rest. In a 2010 thread on storing leather, UKRay said to keep it flat if possible, or rolled rough side out, and warned that creases are hard to get out later. Another member, celticleather, rolled grain side out and said grain-in rolling crushes the grain. A maker called badger, in an older thread on storing hides, punched holes near the edge, hung his hides high on wall hooks under an old horse blanket, and found the roll from shipping simply dropped out.

If you drape hides over a bar, watch the metal. “Iron can leave a stain,” Rockoboy wrote in a thread on draping leather over a pipe, and he warned that light falling across the middle leaves a tan line.

The video above shows my bridle bends hung up in the front workshop. They get looked over when they come in, every one, and a bend with a flaw goes back to the supplier. A rack is no place to discover a scar, a point I made at more length in Reading a Bend Before You Pay for It. The same damp and dark that ruin a finished bag ruin a hide, too, and the post on storing leather bags and shoes before mold finds them walks through that side of it.

What light should you work under?

Light that shows color honestly, and comes from more than one side.

Hands holding a dyed leather swatch under a swing-arm lamp, low light raking across a bridle leather panel.

Bad light lies to you twice. It hides the scratch you’re about to stitch over, and it shows you a brown that isn’t the brown you’ll see at a customer’s desk.

The number to look for on the bulb box is CRI, the color rendering index. Super Bright LEDs, in an explainer on what CRI is, describes it as a 0-to-100 scale of how faithfully a light shows color against natural sunlight, suggests 80 or higher for offices and homes, and puts galleries, retail and photo studios at 90 or higher. Matching a dye to a swatch is gallery work, as far as the eye is concerned.

The makers say the same thing in shop language. In a 2018 thread on shop design, koreric75 warned that LED and fluorescent light skew the color of dyed and buffed leather, and billybopp recommended daylight-balanced light where windows aren’t possible. A separate thread simply called Lights settled on one plan from several directions: a soft overhead and a swing-arm lamp on each side of the bench, so your own hands stop throwing shadows on the line you’re cutting. GeneH added that LEDs run cool and don’t dry out the work.

In my view the side lamps matter more than the overhead. A low light raked across a panel shows every lift in the grain. It’s how you find the flaw before the customer does, and it’s the light I’d want on the bench the day I hand-dye a natural hide black.

Where does the glue go?

Somewhere with moving air and no flame. Read the can, then read the safety sheet.

Solvent contact cement is the one thing in a leather shop that can hurt you while you’re thinking about something else. DAP’s safety data sheet for Weldwood Original Contact Cement, revised in December 2024, classes it as a highly flammable liquid and vapor, says vapors can travel along surfaces to a distant ignition source and flash back, and tells the user to open windows and doors for cross-ventilation. Its instruction is blunt: “Extinguish all flames and pilot lights.” Picture a basement shop with a gas water heater in the corner, and read that line again.

Toluene-free cement is easier on the lungs, and Weaver Leather Supply sells its toluene-free Barge Cement on that basis. One reviewer on that page still told buyers they need lots of fresh air when they use it.

So the glue station goes by a window, with a fan pushing air out, not in. Back in that shop-design thread, which was planning a shop inside a cargo trailer, Firewalker meant to vent his glue station through a hose to the outside on its own blower, and billybopp suggested folding walls around the smelly stations to make a rough booth.

My opinion: this is a beginner question that experienced people get wrong, because the smell turns familiar, and familiar starts to feel safe.

What do you buy first, and what can wait?

A few good hand tools and better leather than you think you can afford.

A leather glue station beside an open window with a fan blowing out and glued leather pieces drying on the bench.

The cheapest advice is also the best. In a leatherworker.net thread on low-budget leatherworking, Stetson912 listed two good knives for cutting and skiving, a good set of stitching or pricking irons, a good awl, a plastic or rawhide mallet, and a hole punch set if you’ll be setting snaps or rivets. He said you only need a few tools to start. Then he put his finger on the real expense: “Cheap leather will really give you issues.” Another member, zuludog, kept his tools in a mechanic-style chest and said it didn’t have to be a top-quality one.

My opinion: that list is close to right, and the machines can wait a long time. I owned the sewing machines once. I gave them up and stitch every seam by hand now, because the hand stitch is the part of the job I won’t give to anything else. The one machine that earned its corner in my shop is old and turned by hand, a crank splitter for thinning strap leather, and I wrote about that work in the post on skiving and splitting bridle.

A power tool bought before you know what you need ends up as a shelf. In a small room a shelf is a tax.

Does the room matter once the work starts?

I’d like to say no. The leather says otherwise.

Here’s where I argue with myself. My whole case for a small shop is that the room doesn’t make the briefcase. The Maker page says every one is made by one person, at “the speed of one pair of hands,” and the hands don’t care whether the walls are close or far. Move the bench, and the work comes with it.

That’s true about the stitching. It isn’t true about the leather.

A hide doesn’t care how good my hands are if it sat a summer in a damp corner, or caught a stripe of afternoon sun, or spent a month folded over a pipe because the rack was full. My Leather Choices page says that in drier rooms the waxes in English bridle bloom to the surface as a haze, which is part of the story in Wax Bloom: Buff It Off or Leave It. The hands can fix a lot. They can’t put grain back that the room took away.

So the honest answer is that the room matters most when nothing is happening in it. It’s what the leather lives in at night, on the weekend, through the slow weeks. Get the storage right, the light true and the air moving, then put the bench wherever it fits, and stop thinking about square feet.

Bostitch VLF100 LED Swing Arm Desk Lamp: A swing-arm LED desk lamp. 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).

Leather Skiving Knife Set, 2 Pieces: A two-piece metal skiving knife set for thinning leather edges. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

Barge All Purpose Cement, Quart: A quart of solvent-based contact cement. 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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