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Hi everyone, Hope your holidays are going well. I know that trying to iron on patches with glue backing on leather does not work well, as they don't stick. But what about suede leather? I have some ladies western style fringe suede vest. I also sell Native American style patches with very good iron on glue backing, not the cheap stuff that never sticks! I assume since suede leather is very "fuzzy" that glue would stick well to it, but I don't want to ruin a vest trying to find out. Anyone know if glue sticks a lot better to suede leather than normal leather? Thank you.

Hi all, It's been a long long time since I posted on here. I am currently experimenting with putting my embroidered patches that I sell onto leather purses and other small leather items. They have a very good solid heat glue backing. However that does not work well on leather. I did some searching and see that PETRONIO RUBBER CEMENT seems to be a good glue for leather. Is there anything better than that? I suppose I may have to rough up the solid glue backing on the patches to get them to stick. I tried the best glue that Tandy leather has and it did not work good at all. Any advice or tips much appreciated. Thank you.

This old dog has learned some new tricks over the past several years and I thought it would be a good idea to put them out here. My handle "Subterra" comes from a very unique root cellar... in case you are wondering. I am in my 60's and have been tooling leather since I was in the Navy and started tooling leather in 1975 after being coached by a Texan on board the USS Enterprise. Wouldn't even take a guess on how many projects I have made over the years... but the last 15-20 years have been working more as a leather artist. I started making leather patches for bikers. One of my own designs started selling like crazy and I needed to figure out how to do multiples of the same design without all the tooling time. I ultimately ended up using an epoxy to make a plate and have made between 50-60 plates of my own designs as well as for biker organizations. In the past four years I ended up being hired by a large organization to produce six different patch designs and have probably produced over 1000 of each design using the plates made from my original tooling. The new trick comes in when learning how to use one of the new products Tandy sells called Waterstain. It is by far the most colorfast stain I have ever used... it doesn't run in the rain, nor fade in the sun. HERE'S THE BEST PART... I had bags and bags of scraps from making the patches so one day it occured to me that with the Waterstain I could probably make a rose. Since then I have made many many roses from my scraps as well as sculptures. They all sell well. Hope you enjoy the photos of some of my leather art. Subterra/Dan

I've been doing a lot of work for my club, and I really enjoy doing the work. Unfortunately I've ruined my wife's Brother (which was kind of a nice machine $500....lol, I need to get it retimed for her). I have a Singer Model 27 that I've started to use, but I'm having some issues with "slowing down on triple and double" layers of leather when sewing patches. Not to mention that the thickness won't pass through the presser foot. My next move is to drop the dime for a nicer machine. Like to move up to an industrial/heavy duty sewing machine. Both my wife and I are also interested in creating other leather works as well, belts, purses, bags, ect.., and finding this site was an obvious plus. I was looking at a few machines, one being the SINGER 191D-30 Complete Industrial Commercial-Grade Straight-Stitch Sewing Machine, and the other being the Juki TL-2000Qi High Speed. I'm not so concerned with speed. I like to take my time and make sure things are correct. I'm open to suggestions for sure. I'm not Mr. Sewing all my life, but I've sewed enough cuts to know that, 1. I get frustrated rolling up a cut to pass it under the machine (not that bad, but I have problems pulling it through evenly without puffing when things are rolled up. 2. I need the strength to pass through several layers of leather and patches. 3. That presser foot height kills me. I saw where the 191D will raise up to 13mm I think. The knee control would be new to me, but seems to be what I would be after to raise that puppy up. I'll muddle my way though one way or another and read through some more posts to see if I can find anything more about this, but I didn't see anything in the first few pages (25), so I thought I would put the question out there. I'm guessing you guys are a lot more advanced than I in this type of work and would appreciate any help/suggestions. I'd like to keep my costs under a $1000, Seadog