LadyRuna

My bad, I was *TOLD* that the leather I was sewing was 3 oz leather...and believed the person since it was the first real leather I'd sewn with. I downloaded the Tandy chart showing leather thicknesses and it looks like the stuff I was sewing with was more like 1.5 or 2 oz....

I just happen to have a Singer 66 as well... I didn't try sewing the purse on the 66 because I'd figured the 201 would do a better job with it. I'll have to try it out next time I start a leather project.

I have a Singer 201 - it happily chews through the 3 oz leather, but I wouldn't force it to work through anything thicker. My 10 other home sewing machines would balk at the thicknesses I've thrown at the 201, but still, I think it would be heavily taxed by forcing it to chew through more than 2 layers of 7-8 oz leather. The motor is very small, so although it will easily handle up to 10 layers of 3 oz leather, I would not push it beyond that - mostly because if you overstress it you may not be able to replace the parts that you wore down. I'm looking to purchase an industrial machine to handle the fabrics that my Singer 201 should not be asked to work with.

From my experience (and documented in my Willcox & Gibbs manual from 1875...a LOVELY antique!!), the additional winding was to increase the tension on the machine. I'm assuming that W&G proposed this "alternate" threading of allowing users to wind the thread around the tensioner up to three times was because at that time, any kind of tension adjuster had not been invented (or thought of - c'mon, 1875 is from the very early days of sewing). Of course. W&G manual also stated that their "automatic tensioner was not to be meddled with".

I just discovered Leatherworker.net recently, after a friend of mine mentioned that he has several elk hides that have been sitting around just waiting for a project (he dreams of having a coat made from the hides...) Well, I've been sewing FABRIC for many years & have made coats, and lots of costumes - including "Neo & Trinity" from the Matrix. Neo's jacket was from black denim, and Trinity was from Lycra-backed vinyl (it's stretchy, but icky synthetic that after 16 years has finally gotten sticky so it can't be worn any longer). As far a leatherwork, I've done a bit of hand-stitching with real leather, made purse handles with pleather (fake leather) & sewn a suede purse (pigskin). I really enjoyed making the purse and found that I prefer using real leather over the pleather. The only advantage of the pleather is that it's far less expensive than real leather - but once you try real leather, you just don't want to go back to the fake stuff. I'm currently working on a project that's using synthetic suede and am sewing it on my trusty antique Singer 201. I love that machine, but since it's a home-sewing machine, I don't want to throw at it anything thicker than 3oz leather. My friend's elk hide is 3 - 6 oz, so some of it will be OK, but I fear that the irregularities in thickness will kill my antique Singer once the number of layers builds up. I'm drooling over some of the spiffy leatherworking machines, but haven't decided which yet. The attached photos are of the purse. It's small - about 6x9" - but a good size for my use. One side has two seams and the other has one because the purse was a "sampler" in which I tried out various leather seaming techniques. Because the pigskin suede was garment-weight (about 2 oz), my Singer 201 sewed it about as easily as any home machine handles quilting cotton.