Craft & Process

From hide and bar

Every piece starts in one of two places: a hide on the bench, or a length of bar stock in the fire.

Leather

The hide is inspected first. Full-grain leather carries the animal's own history — scars, insect bites, growth lines — and part of the work is deciding which of those belong on a finished piece and which do not.

Cutting comes next, and it is the only irreversible step. Straps are cut along the backbone where the fibre is densest; softer belly leather goes to linings and parts that must flex.

Then stitching. Every seam is saddle-stitched by hand with two needles and one thread. It is slow — a bag is days of it — but a saddle stitch cannot unravel. Cut one machine stitch and the seam opens; cut one saddle stitch and the rest holds.

Edges are sanded, dampened, and burnished until they are hard and glassy. This is the step most often skipped, and the one that decides whether a piece still looks good in five years.

Steel

Forging moves metal rather than removing it. The bar goes into the fire until it is orange, and every hammer blow after that is a decision that cannot be taken back.

Blades are normalised several times to relieve the stress that forging puts into the steel, then hardened, then tempered back to a working hardness. Skip any of it and you get something that is either brittle or blunt.

Grinding and hand-sanding follow, through progressively finer abrasives. Hardware — buckles, hooks, fittings — is forged the same way, because a good bag with weak hardware fails at the hardware.

Where the two meet

The pieces I like most need both: a sheath moulded to its own blade, a bag whose fittings were made for it rather than bought by the dozen. Making both halves means neither has to compromise for the other.