JohnBarton

Thanks everyone. The Doc Cue case was done based on the customer's back piece, a small tombstone on the leg and the fact that he was a medic in Vietnam. It took me a year to figure out what I wanted to do on this case. I thought about it a lot. The customer's back is fully tattooed with a Japanese samurai who is also an outlaw as depicted by the body suit he has tattooed on him. He is fighting his oni's or inner demons. So I had Zhen Hai draw this up and we refined it until we were both happy with it. I went through half a sketch book doodling versions before settling on this one. The clouds swirling around the front symbolize confusion giving way to clarity. The Combat Medical Badge on the lid sits as the highest layer on the case to stand for the service above all and that remembering that clears away the pain. The lower pocket has the small tombstone that remembers fallen brothers. While I had the idea in my head of what it should look like Zhen Hai really brought it to life in a way that I never could on my own. He has a great way with shading that works well. I give him a lot of critique from an art director's standpoint but it's just the equivalent of filing away the rough edges on a great piece. I'd like to think that I have given him a platform to become a better tooler and a place to grow as an artist. I am pretty proud of how far he has come since the first pieces he did as contract work. Back then I was working with other toolers who were technically better but he showed me that he really wanted to get better and be creative. And he is. The next case I have to show you all later is going to be out of this world. But I promised the customer that I would let him debut it so it will be another month before it's done.

<br /><br /><br />That Billy2Shews stuff is amazing. The one with the Cameo in the center had me mesmerized for a long time.

I think that The Handbag Resource is basically the software of choice for all the ripoff artists in the world. I looked at this years ago and it's a considerable resource for designing the look of bags. I am not sure but I don't think that they provide actual patterns. I think that what they do is go and get pictures of all the new handbags that come out every year and then their graphic artists draw the bag and add it and it's parts to the library. So it's essentially a collection of line drawings that represent all the fashion bags that come out with the ability to easily take parts from any of them to create new bags. Want a Prada handbag with Gucci handles? Then this is your package. I downloaded some of their free samples and I can see where it would help me to draw cases if I wanted to send people digital mockups of cases and I had lots of call for that. But for us to draw a zipper or a handle goes pretty quickly anyway so it would be a huge expense for not much that we can't do ourselves when the need arises. Honestly, pattern making isn't that hard if you can use a program like Corel Draw or the free equivalents. This, a printer, scissors and tape are how I mock up lots of the cases and parts I want to make. And it's sooooooooo much more satisfying to say that you made it up all by yourself. Sometimes I will see something done somewhere else and I will want to try it. I will draw it out and make my own pattern until I am happy with it. Often this leads to something different that whatever the inspiration was. Here is an online resource for patterns: www.bighousedaddy.com I think.

Just bought the fonts and as they say in pool - it's the nuts! What a great great design tool. It's almost like cheating and really gives me some RESPECT to those who did and do these designs and patterns without help.

We did this case based on the customer's body art;

Yes it is. (I am fairly sure)

Zhen Hai Lee has been with me almost two years. He started out doing contract work for me and I asked him if he wouldn't like to come to work full time. He came from a backwater city in China where he feared that he would be caught up working for that place's equivalent of the mafia. Being a tattoo artist as well as a leather worker he was doing tats for a lot of the local gangsters. He didn't tell me this because he doesn't talk about those things to his "boss" but he did tell my mother in law all about it and that he is very grateful to have been able to bring his family to a safer and secure environment. This is some of the work he does for himself to supplement the income he makes from me. Some of these pieces are sold for more than $200 in China to Chinese customers. Each one is completely hand made by him and his wife in their apartment. Today we had a talk and he wanted me to express to all of you here that he is very grateful that a site like this exists for him to learn from. Even though he can't read it we have translated a lot of the techniques and tutorials from LW for him. Together we are building some nice cue cases. By himself he is building some really nice leather goods. I hope you like them. If you want to browse yourself then check out his TaoBao website: http://shop34439126.taobao.com/

I don't know about others but I used to do my own embroidery and I would trace the pattern onto the material and then very carefully follow it. Took me some practice to get good at it but I got there and when I was done I could do some pretty nice embroidered work using the sewing machine and the zig zag function. Now when we just want to do decorative stitching we draw the lines and just follow them while sewing. A lot of the time we won't use the treadle we will move the needle by cranking the wheel manually. It's slow but you don't accidentally run off the edge of the piece trying to make the curve.

Bob, I respectfully agree and disagree at the same time. I agree that one person can tarnish a good reputation but I disagree that they can ruin it. I have seen people unhappy and willing to get on a pedestal to wreck a maker's rep and what happens time after time is that many happy customers chime in and drown the unhappy customer's voice and put it all back on them. Sometimes I think we overestimate the reach of customers. (and sometimes underestimate it as well). The point is that if you do your best and do what you said you would then it all comes out in the wash. Nevertheless none of us wants unhappy customers for any reason be it their OCD or our own bobbles. Sometimes I think that unhappy customer in a circle of happy ones serves to strengthen the maker's rep and forces the unhappy one to look inward and see if maybe they aren't being unreasonable. I get people all the time who want to rag on me for my choice to have my custom shop in China. Visciously. I tell them to go out and preach the gospel and point all those unconverted potential customers to my website because I know that once they get there I will end up with more business than I had before. Anyway, as always, I digress.

"Those who would trade a little liberty for a little security deserve neither". Ben Franklin. The internet was created to prevent large scale attacks on the system through the packet and routing system. It works unless the governments of the world allow all internet traffic to be bottlenecked and controlled by the few. The private sector has shown that it is incredibly adept at warding off attacks by hackers and virus writers. Example is the latest Conficker worm that the world community has attacked and virtually neutralized despite not knowing who wrote it or what it is supposed to do. I would bet that half the elected officials in Congress barely know how to use email much less have any clue about what the internet is about and how it really works. As if there would some massive attack on the "internet" that would cripple it........good luck - not gonna happen because the Internet runs on Linux :-) Hopefully this bill will die. Don't we have more pressing things going on that need attention?

I will second the vote for Peter Main as an inspiring leather artist. I am personally inspired by Chas Clements www.jacksandsaps.com - look around his site to find the cue cases and knife sheaths From the main page I really am impressed by Karen Bentvelzen's work http://www.leatherart.nl/ Steve B - http://www.steveb.biz/ Anything Kevin King does........ So many folks really it's impossible for me to name them all - recently was blown away by Travis Stilson's sheridan carving on the Peter Main boot tops. Anything Tina does - http://www.leather-fantasy.com/ I mean I could go on all night listing members here and their websites. There is so much awesomeness here. Send Brownie Points. It's just hard to list everyone - Two other guys I like are Arne Mason - http://www.arnemason.com and James Acord - http://www.turtlemoon.com/acord/acord.htm

I should have read through your whole post before replying. For the Bible verses I would consider having those lasered. Pick a nice font that lasers well and then you can work it nicely with some tooling and coloring around each one. Here is a picture of a case we recently did with the inscription lasered into the leather.

Thanks a bunch - I appreciate it. I guess I need to stop thinking of myself as some sort of tortured artist and think of our workshop using the term I use a lot which is "custom production". Where we do bread and butter cases based off of set patterns AND also the special projects. I need to just think of the two differently and have different schedules for each level of case. This is the advice I was looking for because I was trying to treat each case the same as far as scheduling them. AND I HOPE EVERYONE HERE has this same "problem" at some point!!!! John

I have refused jobs before for a variety of reasons. None of them because the customer is picky. I find that for picky customers communication and progress pics work wonders. With progress pics they feel involved and are able to calm themselves as to where the project is at. I am dealing with a customer like this now. From the first moment he asked me for something he was on me constantly about this and that and why didn't I have the sketch to him already and why didn't I do the revision to the sketch and so on...... So I patiently explained the design process and sent him pix of all the drafts and that calmed him down. Now I have sent him two sets of progress pix on the case and he is over the moon. Still he reminded me that he didn't see one element that he asked for and I repsonded that we hadn't gotten that far yet. I guess my point is that if people aren't jerks about it then I want to try and please them. If they want to order me around like a serf then I tell them to take their business elsewhere. I see picky customers as a challenge. One line that works for me is "I will do my best to interpret your desire according to my style". Most customers understand that this isn't Burger King, they don't get to have all their way but I will take their ideas and make an interpretation that I feel works best. Once you satisfy a picky customer they then become your staunchest salespeople. And this is because they really want to promote the few people in their life who can "make them happy." I think it's pretty easy to satisfy someone whose only criteria is "no brown" :-) But I would get all the money up front if this is personalized piece. On pieces that are not personalized or weird then I can usually sell them to someone else - but anything with a name has to be paid up front and I give a satisfaction guarantee that if they don't like it then I will rework it or make another one if need be. In the last 60 cases I have had to remake 3 that weren't personalized and all three of the ones that weren't liked were then sold to others who were less picky. I haven't had to remake anyone's personalized case yet, knock on wood.

I don't know if any of you ever need to make a box pocket that can be opened all the way. In my business the customers like the clean sharp look of the box pocket. But a lot of folks don't like the fact that these pockets are hard to get into with only a single side zipper. So here is my solution. What needs to be done is to split the box pocket into two halves. Then you have an upper part that looks like the lid of a shoe box. Here are pictures - don't mind the stain it's just water to help shape the sides for the purpose of this tutorial. We also did not cut a v-groove to make the corners sharper but obviously we would on a customer ordered case. Top View: You can see that the rectangle looks the same as any other box pocket. Notice that the zipper is not visible. Side View: You can see here that the pocket opens from the upper left corner down to the lower right corner. Notice the rivets in the corners above and below the zipper. THE TRICK: ( I would never be allowed in the magician's guild) You want to add TWO layers of leather INSIDE the pocket on each side of the split pocket. Then sew your zipper to that and it will bring the zipper chain INSIDE the width of the pocket and allow it just enough radius to zip around the corner without sticking or damaging the zipper. The sleight of hand I referred to earlier is that since you are moving the zipper into the pocket it allows the top to have the clean structured look that people love and still get the functionality that people want. This is the model of case that this pocket would be used on:

I think a good way to look at Ebay is to think of it as cheap marketing and to set your prices so that the fee is built in. I know a lot of folks who sell cues on Ebay and they have low cost loss leader type stuff to get the attention of people and what they do is use the low priced auctions to sell people on their "trustworthiness" as a cue dealer. THEN when people see that they have lots of sales and "trust" they sell a few higher end cues "off Ebay" each month at higher profit and without Ebay/PayPal fees. Having an Ebay Store is pretty cheap. So use it to establish yourself and to tell people about your stuff and your philosophy and quality. Here is the thing, Ebay visitors come from EVERYWHERE. They come from google searches, they come from Ebay searches, they come from the unlikliest places. People can get lost in Ebay looking for a wooden rocking chair and somehow end up coming across your "advertisment" (auction) for your leather journals and IF your pitch is compelling then they end up buying from you even though they had no intention of buying a leather journal. And for the people who do go looking for leather journals, well perhaps they are cheap, perhaps they really want the lowest price. Your JOB is to convince them that your price IS the lowest price because it provides the HIGHEST VALUE. You can write as much as you want you can show off as many pictures as you want - you can tell any story that you want to. When a person clicks on your auction listing they are YOURS for a few seconds and if you do your job right then they stay with you for a few minutes and if you REALLY do your job right they buy something from you. It's unfair to paint them all with the same brush. If you really want to be available to millions of people each day then there aren't a lot of better places with both casual and focused shoppers like Ebay. Their practice might be considered monopolistic and heavy handed. I don't disagree with that. However it's not unlike the Antique Malls around the country that rent you a stall and dictate that all purchases go through the main register so that they can get their cut. So for me, if I wanted to do Ebay as a small time leather worker doing high quality goods - I'd treat it as advertisment instead of a vehicle for sales and just tend to look at the occassional sale that comes from an Ebay auction as a bonus.

No matter what take pictures of all your work. I have done hundreds of one of a kind cases over the years and a good 25% of them done in the 90's are lost to me forever because I didn't have a routine of photographing my work before delivery. I suggest highly that you post your pictures to an online gallery somewhere or put them up on a server somewhere. The thing is that you should be careful about using a third party place like Flickr or Picassa because when they change the rules then you can lose everything you put there. This happened to me on Flickr where I have 1000 images and they changed the rules and now tell me I have to PAY to see more than 200 images at a time. On Picassa we just "lost" around 500 images. So what I did after those two incidents is to go to HostGator www.hostgator.com and get a hosting account which comes with three FREE Flickr-style image gallery programs and you can install as many of them as you like. This is my image gallery - JB Cases Image Gallery This is just a folder on my server where I keep images - http://www.jbcases.com/cases/ This way I can either keep the images in albums or in folders and I can refer to them anytime like this This way you build your online portfolio and always have something to refer a customer to. I personally wouldn't bother with a PDF catalog unless you intend to print it someday. The reason I say this is that if it's just intended to be an electronic photo album then just do it like I outlined above. If you do the PDF file then you have to contain the photos inside another piece of software and the file gets bigger and bigger and harder to move around. Better to upload your photos to a place where customers can browse around at their leaisure without having to download a large file. Also you would be tasked with updating this fill all the time and making sure that your customers have the latest copy, etc... Now if you want to do a catalog and have it be well presented then by all means do a nice PDF brochure that can be printed someday. For marketing purposes the better you present your work the more highly it will be regarded by those who don't already know how good it is. I can tell you that one of my competitors does just fantastic photos of their work and when I look at their photos I feel that their work is "better" than mine just based on the photos. Their background and lighting is very artistic. As such their portfolio and presentation is way better than mine. So there is a lot of merit in spending time on proper presentation. I don't have time for that. My friend is going to send me a picture of his setup though. I just traded for an Olympus E-410 SLR and have to learn to use it and build a lightbox to light up our cases in the right way. If I can just get good detailed pix that will be presentation enough for me. Check out Hostgator though - I can't rave enough about what you get for the money from this hosting company. John http://www.jbcases.com/gallery/main.php

I used to put a card in with my cases which told the history of the company on the front side with a thank you note for buying my case. On the back side I had some instructions on the care of leather and how to use the case. I believe that these cards are very important for the customer. This thread has reminded me that I need to make some new ones for my current products. One of my customers reminded me a month ago that I need to be putting business cards in the cases we sell so customers can easily relay the right info when they get asked, "where did you get that cool case?" :-)

Well I guess this isn't the worst problem in the world but it's definitely got me staying awake at night. I have reached the point where I have more orders than time to design and make them. I even made an announcement that I wasn't taking any more orders until October. The problem is that I just can't turn people away. I want to be the one to make their dream case. But I can't be creative on demand and I find that I don't want to be the kind of case maker who delivers the same case in a slightly different way each time. I really want the freedom to work on what I want to do. I want to tackle the really interesting projects and work on new techniques and new ways to do things. I hate to say that I am bored sometimes when I have to sit down and draw a sketch for an uninteresting case. I will often give the customers a little more than they ordered just because I want to make it fun for me to design the case. So now here is the problem: We can only make so many cases a month about 4-8 depending on the complexity. I have orders for the next 6 months or so and about 20 pending inquiries which are in various stages of design. I need advice on how best to arrange the schedule logistically and how to deal with the idea that I am losing my ability to play and experiment due to having to "work" on only that which the customer wants. Yes, I know Bree, I should get with the program and realize that I am in business to make money :-) You're right as always - still though........ Any help would be appreciated as to how any of you handle this type of situation.

On the billiard forum I participate in there is an NPR - Non Pool Related section. Over there it's all politics all the time and things get pretty ugly. You would think that people would be happy to put politics aside and share the common bond that is the love of the game. The problem is that often the controversies which get so heated in the NPR section spill over into the other sections with snide remarks, stalking troll posts, and just general bad vibes. I vote no for anything like that here. All of us have our opinions on how the world works, what's wrong with it and how to "fix" it. The staunchest conservative and the bleeding heart liberal here have one thing in common, they agree that the leather doesn't know or care what your views are, you either work it right or you don't and you stand back and admire each other's work regardless of your views on life. I come here to get away from all that other stuff and I still don't have time to keep up with everything. Let's not create a place to sap our energy and creativity and cause divisiveness.

Fantastic work. I love the flow of this piece. Hope Aunt Megan stays cancer free and uses this bag for decades to come! This bag is 1000s of times better than any Coach bag I have ever seen. It should be on sale for $1000 in a boutique instead of what they put out.

Tom, These two stamping patterns were introduced on cue cases by a man named Jay Flowers in the early 80s. In fact, the two cases we did for Tim and Mike are part of a tribute line I started to resurrect the Jay Flowers style of case. Of course you can take any pattern we do and use it. That's why I post here.

We do the interiors ourselves. There are two methods we use. For these two cases we use extruded tubes that we designed and had made to our specs. We sew up a fabric interior with lots of foam rubber between the layers of fabric for the cavities. The second method we use is to line plumbing and electrical tubes with padded fabric and then bond those tubes together to form the interior. We are starting to get inquiries to sell our interiors and although I am still on the fence about it I have decided to sell a limited amount of them that are labeled as JB Case interiors. At least that way we credit for the most important part of the case. At least it's my opinion that the interior is the most important part. :-)

One of my customers is a great friend to have. He directed me to make cases for two of his favorite cue makers. Tim Scruggs and Mike Cochran are living legends in the cue business. In addition to being two of my favorite people they both build fabulous cues. Here are the cases we did for them: We lasered the Fighting Irish and the Tree of Life on the front and tooled the names and logos.

That looks SO NICE!