Strapping Young Thing

I didn’t post anything yesterday because my time was completely consumed by this…

Check that – my whole week was consumed by this.

In the beginning, the plan was to stitch it with waxed linen thread. This is how I usually do things around here because A) leather lace is pricey and B) The stitch pictured (called double cordovan) takes forever, which also jacks up the price of the finished piece.

When the future owner of this strap (sorry, top secret) decided to go with the lace, I was psyched. I had remained neutral on the question of lace versus linen thread because I didn’t want it to seem like I was pushing the more expensive of the two, even though my only real desire to lace came from a place that knew it would look rad.

I was on the side of linen almost solely because of how daunted I was by the prospect of lacing an entire strap.

It turned out to be fully manageable and even enjoyable.

I was a hundred times faster than I used to be, finishing he main body of the strap in the same amount of time it used to take me to lace a wallet (which is still a long time, but waaaayyy too long for a wallet).

I think part of the reason for this is that I learned to lace at the same time I learned everythig else when I started doing leather work three years ago. Lacing was a sidenote to carving, tooling, staining, finishing, stitching, using tools, etc. There was a lot to absorb and lacing was hard and so I knocked out a dozen wallets and forgot about it.

This time around, after a refresher lesson at Tundra , the work flew. So I’m, as always, super grateful to Peter and Sean for taking the time to answer a million questions this week.

I’m also grateful for the order. If it hadn’t come in, I’d still be scared of lacing, thinking a strap like this would take me 86 hours to finish.

As it is, I now know the truth and am planning another laced strap for the new year.

If you want to see it in action, check out this show at Toronto’s Dakota tonight.

PS – Check out the newly opened Baltimore House on King William. It’s awesome.