Saddlemaking- Opinions on Instruction

[Duke]

as much as I promote the stohlman encyclopedia, I need to re-emphasize whatbruce has said before. al stohlman is A saddle maker, not THE saddle maker. there are lots of other resources out there. another resource for you is dusty johnsons saddle school. good luck getting into it though, as he is always booked full. I do reccommend that you buy his series of books/ dvd's though. he even has full sized patterns that you can buy. check it out.and good luck

[SaddleRider]

Just over a year ago, my neighbor who happened to own his own shoe, boot, saddle repair & custom leather shop, needed someone to come in to take care of his bookkeeping and website work and offered the jobs to me. I gladly accepted both tasks.

The following couple of weeks, I noticed that he was totally overwhelmed, what with all the custom leather work, shoe, boot and saddle repairs to the point that he was about two weeks behind on most everything in the shop. He and I sat down for lunch one day and I said, "You know, this really is a two man operation. From the looks of things, I'd say you need someone to help you out in the shop as well as the back office." He replied, "Yeah, this really is a two man operation, but my son left for a better paying job and I can't blame him for that. Are you interested in learning the craft?" "You bet I am!" I replied.

The moral of the story is, that I got the "old-fashioned apprenticeship" which few offer in this day and age. Meaning I learned shoe, boot, saddle repair & custom leather making by working in his shop with on the job training and a very small paycheck each week. The real paycheck was from the educational gains, which will pay off down the road (I hope).

Additionally, my neighbor closed his shop in November 2008, moved two hours away to semi-retire, got married and is building a new garage workshop at his new place. I've been doing it out of my home since. I do not have the industrial machines to do the boot repairs, so I mainly focus on doing custom leather & saddle repair. I do everything by hand (meaning hand-stitching everything since I don't own a machine).

While I can tear down and repair saddles (and their parts or replace the parts), I have never had the opportunity to build a custom made saddle myself, which I would like to do at some point in the future.

If I could find someone or a shop which offers or is interested in offering an "old-fashioned apprenticeship" and is reasonably close to me, so I would not have the added expense of additional accomodations, I would certainly jump at the chance to learn how to make custom saddles and work in your shop for the small paycheck and educational advancement in the field.

I think this would be a great way to bring people back to learning arts/crafts/trades which are dying as opposed to making people pay to learn it. Some can afford to pay for schooling, while others (including myself) can't.