Hi all I am a new member. I grew up on my family's third generation farm in Pennsylvania. I have always enjoyed leatherwork but never had time to do it. That is until I was in a bad work accident Dec. 23/2008. I was run over by a tractor at work. It ran me over from my feet over the back and over my head. The left side of my face was crushed. They rebuilt my eye socket and parts of my skull out of titanium and I have an implant holding my left eye in place. I needed brain surgery I was on the table for four hours having my brain and brain stem worked on. The doctor said if I didn't get brain surgery I would be paralyzed. Thankfully they fixed me up and I can walk around now and live a pretty normal life. But I can't carry more than 25 pounds and I have to sleep on a wedge pillow if I lay flat I will get dizzy and throw up. I was worried about what I would do for a job because of my limitations both lack of a collage education and the fact that I can't labor anymore. I have thought about disability but I didn't want to get on it unless I absolutely couldn't make it on my own. My lawyer said I couldn't get on it anyway cause of my age. I could always draw and I was bored so I ordered some leatherworking tools from Tandy. People liked my work and soon I was getting orders. My sister said to me why don't you start a business selling your work. A few trips to the lawyer and accountant and now I own Calvary Leathers LLC 50/50 with my sister. She does the sewing and leather braiding work. I can't seem to wrap my head around the leather braiding lol. And I do the leather tooling. I have been selling by word of mouth, business cards and flyers. But everyone wants me to open an internet store I already had an etsy account from buying things so I just put a few things up on that for now https://www.etsy.com/Shop/CalvaryLeathersLLC. I plan on opening a store of my own soon. But for now I will see what happens with etsy. Anyway I am not an expert leather craftsman but I do pretty well. I am still learning as I go on. I have been looking at this website for a while and finally decided to become a member of it. I don't get out that much my business is in the house because my father has Alzheimer’s and I take care of him and mom. I would say that my biggest problems I have with leather work is making the eyes. And pine trees I hate tooling pine trees LOL. So that is about it hi to everyone I am going back to work on a purse now. A lady asked me to make her a purse with lions and tigers on it. A lot of eyes LOL.
