How to Sew Leather

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Sam Lewis from madebysam.com and I here to discuss how to sew leather. Once you have your machine set up with a chisel tip leather needle and heavy duty nylon upholstery thread, the next thing you need to do is set yourself up. Take the two pieces of leather, good side to good side, trimmed even, set them under your presser foot and for leather you need to start fairly well inside of your outside line so that you will be able to pull through your material without having it bind. And on leather you generally want to start with about a quarter of an inch seam. You don't want a whole lot of leather on the wrong side of your seam. So bear in mind if you're transferring a fabric pattern you may want to do smaller seams or you want to come back and cut off your seams latter. Make the first stitch by hand, going through one complete cycle and then slowly lead through. You'll want to go very slowly because it's a very heavy material and you will want as you go, take several practice passes through your material and decide what your sewing machine wants to have as far as tension. In this particular case with this particular machine, right in the middle of the tension works pretty well. You can see, because the leather's so thick, your stitches burrow in to the leather. But when you flip it out you've got a nice tight seam. And that is how to sew leather."