Behold the gnarliest piece of leather I’ve ever tried to work with.

When you buy leather you order it by the side, or roughly half a cow. What you get doesn’t come in nice uniform sheets. You get something roughly cow shaped and all the trials and tribulations that cow has been through are going to show up on the hide.

As you can imagine, not all parts of the hide are equal. There is nice tight grain that is smooth and dyes beautifully along the back and flank.

Then there is this. This comes from what would be the front under neck area. It is usually considered waste leather. It is spongy with loose grain. It has scars and bug bites. It is wrinkled and folded.

I’m very diligent about not wasting anything. Thicker leather scraps get cut down into punch pads or cutting mats to protect my tools. Thinner leather gets used as liner or filler in handles or I’ll make a case out of it to protect my tools when I’m not using them.

This part of this hide though I’ve never been able to use. It won’t lay flat so I can’t use it as a work surface. That loose grain means it won’t hold up as a tool cover.

The thing about it though is that I find it really interesting. All though wrinkles and folds and changing density in grain does weird things as it tries to soak up dye.

To me this is like burled chestnut. For a long time highly figured wood was seen as waste. All those curls and whorls make for very poor chair legs. As we got better at cutting and refining wood suddenly that gnarly piece of firewood had a new kind of value.

So here is what I’m trying. I want to see what happens when I take all that nasty messed up leather and then stretch it over a form and smooth it out.

It’s different. And weird. And if it works I’m going to love it. In all honesty I think its going to fail. But I won’t know until I’ve tried.