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Capster - thank you for your compliments. Actually the molding itself was quite straightforward as the Kindle is only about 9mm thick itself and I made a press out of exterior ply. In theory I can now replicate it fairly easily. The tricky bit was cutting the window for the screen so that it lined up properly - that took a bit of fiddling and I was quite surprised how well it turned out. Sheer luck ! The other problem was that the leather that had been molded took the dye slightly differently to the rest, but I just let it be as I don't think it looks too odd.

My wife has had an Etsy shop for a few years now and the nature of the thing has changed a lot in that time. They used to really make sure that people were only selling things that they had made themselves. In recent years they have bought various other similar sites and IPO-ed, the number of shops has grown massively and Etsy seems to have given up policing the products on offer so there are mass-produced items selling very cheaply alongside hand made ones. As a result it is increasingly difficult for an individual to get noticed. The folk who seem to do best on Etsy are those that spend a great deal of time and effort blogging and collecting followers. Etsy used to do "treasuries" where people would put together a collection of their favourite things (I don't know if they still do this). If you were featured in one of these then it generally caused a hike in visits to your shop. The way to get in a treasury seems to be to make your own with other peoples work in the hope that they will reciprocate. They also used to select shops for features. If you were lucky enough to be featured then that would also boost footfall. As someone has already said, it is important to get the right keywords so that you come up in search results for Google and for Etsy itself. There's advice here https://www.etsy.com/uk/help/article/821 for how to structure your product titles and tags and how to see what people are searching for in your shop stats. Try searching for your own products by various combinations in Google and Etsy and see where you come in the results. Change your title and tags and try again to optimise your chances of appearing higher in the results. There are any number of folks out there selling leather bracelets for example so you need to work out how to get yours to stand out in a search. My wife also believes that you get more visits if you are frequently listing new items (or re-listing old ones) and if you have more than 100 items in your shop and again more than 200. Your bracelets look really great by the way and are very different to the majority of those on offer. I'm sure people will be buying if they are brought to their attention.

Wyoming Slick - I do intend to make a chair with a leather seat and back - playing with some ideas around this at the moment but probably won't get anything done properly until winter when I cut more wood. Most of the greenwood stuff I have done so far lives outside which isn't really suitable for leather, so the new chair design needs to be refined enough so that my wife allows it in the house. I will post when I have something to show.

Hi Kings X, Thanks. My stitching is improving so I'll hopefully keep them straighter on the next piece. My daughter may like the backpack, it introduces me to a number of new techniques, so it depends how well I get on with them.

Hello folks. I've been getting into leatherwork this last year and have found lots of fantastic info on here, so many thanks to all of you for sharing your wealth of experience and talent. I'm English but living in the French Pyrenees and interested in all sorts of stuff from canoeing to green woodwork. Slowly building my leather working tools collection and trying out various projects , some more successfully than others - but these are very much learning exercises. So far I've made some belts, a knife sheath, machete sheath, moulded 'possibles' pouch, passport wallet and a Kindle cover. I've also gone through many square feet of leather, been in trouble for 'borrowing' some of my wife's upholstery tools, dyed my left hand a startling burnt-orange colour (reminiscent of a 70's bathroom suite) and neglected all of my regular chores. Currently working on a backpack for my daughter and a saddle bag style hand bag thing (because I fancied making one). I've attached some photos of the Kindle cover I made. I have the photos because I bought my wife the kindle and made this to go with it - she took the photos - I generally intend to but don't get around to it. This was the second design I came up with. The retainer on the first one was too flexible so I made this one with a mold and wet-formed it (water and gelatine). Quite pleased with how the retainer came out but my stitching needs some work. In particular I find it difficult to keep the stitching exit holes aligned when going through multiple or thick layers, so you can see how they stagger around a bit in places. More practice required I think.