Digit

At school we learn to cut liner a bit larger than the leather panels to glue it to. That way you have extra space to apply glue so that the glue extends to the very edge of the leather. Afterwards the excess liner is cut off. We also always stitch edges so that the liner doesn't come loose. If liner and leather is properly glued together and cut to the exact same size, painting the edges shouldn't be a problem. I've painted edges with three layers (outer leather, salpa reinforcement, and pigskin liner) without a problem. If stuff doesn't exactly line up you can start with a coat of filler before applying the first coat of edge paint.

If by microsuede you mean something like Alcantara, then it's a woven fabric. Woven things always fray eventually. You can limit fraying by stitching in addition to glueing: if you stitch parallel to the warp, you secure the weft so that only warp threads on the 'free' side of the stitch line can come loose (if they're not glued). You should never apply rolling pressure when glueing something non-stretchy to something spongy: by pressing it down you make the spongy bit expand. When you remove the pressure it contracts again and the surfaces of both materials won't match anymore. This can result in wrinkling or warping depending on either materials' strength.

Thank you for your insights. In my case leatherwork is a starting hobby, so I don't have much experience and most of what I do goes with a lot of thinking, trial & error and experimenting. I also don't have a drawer filled with patterns (yet), so I spend a lot of time designing them. This case was an easy one in that respect because I could base myself on an existing pattern that I could adjust. I'm currently working on a biker's leg bag where I have to design everything from scratch, which seems to have taken as long as actually putting the bag together. At this point in time I'm happy to get material costs covered, plus some extra that I can invest in new stuff. Good point about overheads though; from what I charged for this customer I figure I have my material and overhead costs covered. I don't have to make a living out of leatherwork, I have a full-time day job as well that I won't let go of. I'd have to charge over 45 euros per hour on top of materials and overheads to match my current job's hourly rate and with my current abilities that's out of the question.

Yesterday I finished my first order: a client of my partner asked if I could make her a leather case for putting her reading glasses in. They're some special kind of foldable ones, so I took the pattern from the case we made at school and adjusted it to fit her glasses. I gave her a choice of colours from what I have lying around: black, green or brown outside, combined with a black, blue, red or brown inside. I had no idea what to ask for it so a gave a price fork of between 10 and 20 euros. This is how it turned out and I'm pretty satisfied with it. I hope she'll be too. Afterwards I did some calculations for material costs: the surrounding rectangle of the pattern came down to 400cm² (rounded up), so that made for 3.55 euros of leather, salpa and suede. Added to that some guestimates of 20 ml of glue, a metre of thread, 5 ml edge paint and two small neodymium magnets I had lying around, I reached a material cost of around 5.5 euros, so I asked for 15. What would you guys have charged for something like this?

The non-medical variant is simply called a (foldable) workshop crane. It comes in various configurations but it usually has two wheeled legs that go under or to the sides of the load and an arm (sometimes telescopic) that can be moved up or down hydrolically, pneumatically or with a screw drive. Max carrying weight goes up to two or three metric tons, depending on the model. My mechanic has one in his garage to lift engines out of cars.

I stick a bit of paper masking tape underneath my machine's feet to smooth out the teeth if needed. Most of the time I sew lightweight things and I use a very small walking foot (aound 2x3mm smooth footprint), which I think is intended to sew near zippers or around magnets/buttons.

I don't consider myself poor, but neither am I rich enough to be able to afford all the specialty sewing machines that are needed to stitch all possible seams. I have a basic, run-of-the-mill walking foot cylinder arm machine and that's it. I try to design things (or adjust patterns) in such a way that they can be machine stitched, but sooner or later I'll have to resort to manual sewing for 'difficult' seams. Not necessarily out of stitch strength or financial considerations, but for the esthetics. I think (maybe naively due to lack of experience) that most items can be created using the same machine stitch, but not all of those items will look pleasing to the eye (or be comfortable to wear) when there are thick seams (however thin one can skive them) and exposed edges (however fine one can finish them).

I have no experience with hand stitching, but a possible weakness with a saddle stitch might be that you keep pulling the same thread through the leather, abrading the thread and making it slightly weaker with each hole you pass. By the time you reach the fiftieth hole, the thread has been pulled through fifty holes. With a (machine) lockstitch only a short amount of (top) thread gets pushed through the hole and pulled back, while the bottom thread doesn't get pulled through at all. So any bit of the top thread at any moment in time has been pushed through the leather only a couple of times and so has only worn down a little bit. Increased thread abrasion with manual stitching is offset by typically using thicker thread sizes as far as I can tell (so they there is more material to abrade before the thread becomes too weak) and waxing the threads for lubrication (so they abrade less when pulled through holes). On the other hand, the threads in a lockstitch basically make a 180 degree U-turn and as has been said before, that sort of a concentrated pulling point might be a weak spot. That said, now I wonder where a thread usually breaks when it does: in the exposed bit along the leather (in which case it doesn't really matter which stitch type you use), or in the hidden bit inside the leather where the threads are either locked (lockstitch) or where they pass each other (saddle stitch). Also, to be fair, one should compare apples with apples: so we should compare different stitch types using the same thread type/size and leather and that could be hard. Running a thick waxed thread through a machine would require a heavy duting sewing machine and using an unwaxed machine thread while hand stitching for any serious length would probably wear away the fibres in the thread... In the end I think both stitch types are comparable in strength and it would largely depend on thread thickness, thread material, and the way in which an item is used how soon a stitch would fail.

At 42 I'm still pretty unscathed, apart from the occasional flesh wound (scratches, punctures, cuts, mildly crushed limbs, broken nails) but I've never been seriously wounded. I cracked a shoulder blade once by driving my bike straight while the road curved and I hit a crash barrier at about 80km/h (50 mph) and I also dislocated a shoulder once when falling during a hike. Lucky for me, neither of those accidents had any lasting damage. The only lasting damage I have is caused by spending an evening next to a thickness planer without hearing protection. I spent a few weeks going crazy with tinnitus, after which it slowly died away, together with the ability to hear certain frequencies. I'm still lucky the tinnitus didn't last (it does come back when I'm tired though) and I only have have around 12dB hearing loss. Since then I always wear hearing protection when working with machines or driving my bike. During my bike crash I was lucky to wear leather and since then I've ditched my textile bike gear.

I have absolutely no experience with this kind of cutting board, but LDPE has a pretty low melting point, so could you smooth down those ridges using an iron? Possibly using some baking paper to protect it?

Yeah, for cutting wheels the guard is best left on; those blades can be very thin and one wrong movement can make them explode. I only remove the guard on fiddly jobs when I need to reach a difficult spot for grinding with a flap disc or a bristle wheel, and even then I wear goggles (those bristles tend to fly around too).

When you're responsible for anyone other than yourself, then yes you need to follow laws and regulations, including those around safety and liability. I'm on my own, so naturally I remove obstacles such as a finger guard on my sewing machine, or the safety guards on my drill press or angle grinder when it suits my needs

I bought aftermarket feet for my Adler; they came with finger guards and I removed all of them. They just get in the way imo. I already live in nanny state Belgium; I can do without a nanny-sewing machine

During my woodworking period I learned that MDF is made from scrap wood and scrap wood can contain scrap of any kind (bits of nails and screws, bits of paint, sometimes even bits of lead from bullets or grape shot that ended up in trees). The large bits are mostly sieved out, but smaller bits can remain, especially on the inside of the panel: MDF is unlike fibreboard or chipboard in that MDF panels use smaller wood fibres on the oudside and coarser fibers (and potential scrap) on the inside. It's mixed nicely with glues and resins, making it more plasticky than real wood and if those additives contain formaldehyde, spending long periods of time near that MDF could be bad for your health. If you want to use wood for a cutting board, I suggest using end grain as cutting surface, that way you don't have a grain that could force your knife in directions you don't want or dull it down by cutting across the grain.

That's a wonderful jacket. I hope I'll be able to make something like that some day. Does it only have snaps for closing or is there a zipper underneath as well?