Small Projects From Leather Offcuts
A scrap is only useful if you know what it can still do.
Leather offcuts pile up faster than anyone plans for, and the bin under the bench turns into a second hide nobody paid attention to, all corners and strips and half-moons left over from the pieces that mattered. Some of it is good leather. Some of it is junk that looks like good leather. The work of a small project starts before the project, with sorting, because a thick bridle offcut and a soft scrap of chrome-tanned glove leather are not the same raw material just because they both came out of the same box. Making something from nothing is the part of this trade I love. Making something from the wrong nothing is how a small project fails.
Video: 7 Scrap Leather Projects, from Daniel Stabile on YouTube.
Your own bin or somebody else’s box
A bought scrap box is a gamble with known odds. Your own bin is a record of what you already cut.
Two kinds of buyer end up with offcuts. One saves them. The other buys them, usually to practice on. If you are buying, the listings are worth reading slowly, because they say more than they seem to.
Buckleguy sells a 5-pound box of Wickett & Craig scrap, mixed vegetable-tanned remnants from all over the hide in English bridle, harness, milled harness, skirting and natural vachetta. It comes in a light weight, 2.5 to 7.5 ounces, and a heavy weight, 8 to 12 ounces, and the page estimates about 5 square feet per pound for the light and about 2.5 for the heavy. The caveats are printed plainly: each box is different, one box may hold only one type or color, expect irregular shapes and marks, and the sale is final. The listed sale price runs from $42 to $54 depending on the variant.
Sailrite’s 5-pound scrap box is cheaper at $27.95 and mixes vegetable-tanned and chrome-tanned pieces. Its own description is honest about the catch: “None of the scraps are labeled.” It suggests a thickness gauge or calipers to find out what you have, and it is not returnable.
The difference matters more than the price. A labeled box from one tannery tells you the tannage and the weight range before you open it. An unlabeled mixed box means testing every piece. My opinion: for a beginner learning to stitch and burnish, the single-tannery box is worth the extra money, because a burnish that fails on a chrome scrap teaches you nothing about burnishing.
Sort before you make anything
Tannage first, then thickness, then size. In that order.
The Leather Dictionary’s entry on leather waste lists the three fates of an offcut in industry: thrown away, used as insulating material, or, if the size suits, cut into smaller pieces for small objects or patchwork. The bench version is the same choice, made one scrap at a time.
Tannage goes first because it decides what the leather will do. Tandy’s beginner’s guide to wet forming says vegetable-tanned leather holds its shape well when wet, and the Wickett & Craig listing notes that its natural vachetta scrap is unfinished and takes dye and oil. My opinion: a chrome scrap is for softness, and for nothing that needs a burnished edge or a molded shape. If you cannot tell which is which, it belongs in its own pile until you can.
Thickness goes second, and a gauge settles it faster than a thumb. Then size: long strips, squares, and small odd pieces.
Where on the hide the scrap came from matters too, though a scrap rarely tells you. On a hide, the bend is where the fiber is tightest, and the bend is what I cut briefcases from. The shoulder goes to small parts. Weaver Leather Supply’s guide to the cuts of a side says of the belly, “Fibers are softer and looser than in other parts of the side.” It also says belly is often considered waste and can still be useful sewn to the back of a firmer piece for comfort. A scrap from the belly will stretch where a bend scrap will not, so it is the wrong choice for anything that has to hold a hole or a shape.
How a bend gets cut down, and why the offcuts look the way they do, is covered in cutting a briefcase out of a bridle bend.
Thick, stiff pieces go to the hardware jobs
Washers, spacers, test pieces and clamp pads. The unglamorous work.
Heavy bridle and harness offcuts are too stiff for most small goods, and that stiffness is exactly what makes them good at the jobs nobody photographs. In a leatherworker.net thread on small offcuts, the member who started it cuts his scraps into washers of several sizes to back rivets and poppers, and keeps them ready. Another, cgleathercraft, uses offcuts to test whether a punch is the right size for a rivet before punching the real piece, and as buffer pads to stop clamps marking work that has just been glued.
A later thread on what to do with scrap leather adds stacked leather handles for knives, tools and fishing rods, washers and gaskets for old machines, and conchos. One member, Handstitched, reports cutting gaskets for an old tractor’s carburetor with a craft knife.
My opinion: the most valuable use of a thick bridle offcut is the test piece. Every new edge, every dye, every stitch spacing goes on a scrap of the same leather before it goes on a panel. A scrap that saves a ruined briefcase gusset has earned more than any key ring.
The heavy-weight Wickett & Craig box, at 8 to 12 ounces, is mostly this kind of leather. Buy it for practice and for the shop, not for wallets.
Long strips go to loops and keepers
If it is long and straight, it already knows what it wants to be.
Strips are the most useful shape in the bin, because the cutting is already half done. In the small-offcuts thread, a member called UKRay lists belt loops, loops for the backs of pouches, longbow string keepers and archery tabs among his uses. Handstitched, in the scrap thread, turns long strips into bookmarks, plaited key rings and riveted belts.
A strip from a good bend can become a keeper, a pull tab, a hanging loop for a tool, or the small loop on a leash, the kind of part I described in a bridle dog leash built to be handled. What decides it is the grain on both sides and whether the strip is long enough to fold back on itself with room to stitch.
Check the edges of a strip before you plan anything. A bought box will have strips cut at odd angles and edges marked by handling, and Buckleguy says to expect irregular shapes. Recut a fresh edge before you bevel, or the old damage shows through the burnish like a dent through new paint.
Thin and soft scraps go to small goods
Light leather is where the small projects people actually picture come from.
The 2.5 to 7.5 ounce weights are where most of the familiar small items live. Buckleguy’s own listing suggests the scrap for small items, trim, repairs, practice, wallets and key fobs. Sailrite suggests keychains, watchbands and wallets, plus practice at tooling, stitching and dyeing.
The forum lists go further. Soft leather for tassels and small dangles, round and square pieces for fridge magnets and stamped tags, tiny pieces for earrings, covers for metal buttons, zipper pulls, appliqué and patchwork. Handstitched suggests selling vegetable-tanned offcuts to wood turners for pens and trim. Another member, fredk, uses discs for board game pieces and the feet of small objects.
How to choose among those comes down to one question about the scrap in your hand: will it be handled, or will it be looked at? A zipper pull or a key fob gets rubbed, bent and dropped every day, so it wants firm vegetable-tanned leather and a finished edge. A patch or an appliqué gets looked at, so color and grain matter more than strength.
My opinion: leave the soft chrome scraps for linings, tassels and button covers, and do not try to make them hold an edge. They will not, and the failure looks like your fault.
What not to save
Keeping every scrap feels thrifty. Most of the time it is just storage.
Here is the argument against everything above, and I agree with a good part of it. The original poster in the scrap thread had a big box of pieces too small for his own work and no time for small projects, and asked whether to throw them out or sell them. The answers were generous: give them to schools or charities for fundraisers, pass them to newer makers for practice. Handstitched put it plainly: “I’d rather give them away than throw them out.”
My own practice is harder than that, and I will not pretend otherwise. The belly of a hide goes in the trash in my shop. Leather with flaws goes back to the supplier. That is not thrift, and it does not sound like a man who loves making things from nothing. It is the opposite instinct, the one that says a briefcase with my name on it gets the best part of the hide and nothing else.
Both instincts are right, for different jobs. The bin is for test pieces, washers and the occasional small thing made for its own sake. Anything that will never be one of those is clutter, and somebody else’s beginner would get more from it than my shelf does. Before you buy a box, look at how to read a bend before you pay for it, because the best scraps start as the best leather.
A bin that only grows is a shelf. A bin that feeds the test pieces is a tool.
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Sources
- Buckleguy, “Wickett & Craig Leather Scrap, 5 lbs Box”: https://www.buckleguy.com/wickett-craig-leather-scrap-5lbs-box/
- Sailrite, “Vegetable & Chrome Tanned Scrap Leather (5 lbs.)”: https://www.sailrite.com/Vegetable-Chrome-Tanned-Scrap-Leather-5-lbs
- Leather Dictionary, “Leather waste”: https://leather-dictionary.com/index.php/Leather_waste
- Tandy Leather Canada, “A Beginner’s Guide to Wet Forming Leather”: https://tandyleather.ca/blogs/tandy-blog/a-beginners-guide-to-wet-forming-leather
- Weaver Leather Supply, “Leather Cuts: Getting to Know the Different Cuts”: https://weaverleathersupply.com/pages/understanding-a-leather-side
- leatherworker.net, “Small offcuts and what to do with them”: https://leatherworker.net/forum/topic/64472-small-offcuts-and-what-to-do-with-them
- leatherworker.net, “What to do with scrap leather”: https://leatherworker.net/forum/topic/89906-what-to-do-with-scrap-leather
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