The Smell of Leather: Why the Workshop Begins Before You Pick Up a Tool

A workshop is a sensory experience

There is something about walking into a leather workshop that is difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it. Before you’ve picked up a tool or started working on a piece of leather, you already know you’ve arrived somewhere different.

Often, the first thing you notice is the smell.

Leather has a distinctive character. Depending on the type of leather and how it has been treated, it can smell warm, earthy and rich. For someone who works with leather regularly, that smell becomes part of the environment. It is as familiar as the tools on the bench or the sound of thread being pulled through a stitch.

There are other things you notice once you start paying attention. There is the sound of tools being placed on the bench, the feel of leather between your fingers and the particular sound of a knife moving through the material. Then there is the rhythm of stitching and the sound of an edge being prepared and finished.

All of those things form part of the experience.

Making is a physical experience

Much of modern life is experienced through screens. We work through them, communicate through them, shop through them and use them for much of our entertainment.

Making something by hand is different because the feedback is immediate and physical.

You have to touch the material and look closely at what you’re doing. If something isn’t quite right, the leather generally tells you. You begin to understand how it responds to pressure, movement and different techniques, and over time you develop a feel for the material that is difficult to acquire simply by reading about it.

That physical relationship is one of the reasons I think leatherwork continues to appeal to people.

There is something satisfying about using your hands to solve a problem and seeing a physical result at the end of the process.

The surroundings become part of the experience

The workshop itself matters too.

Diamond Awl is based at Woodend Mill, a former cotton mill built in 1848. The building has its own industrial history and is now home to a community of artists and creative businesses. There is something particularly appropriate about practising a traditional craft in a building that has itself been part of our manufacturing history.

The surroundings become part of the experience of making.

For me, making has always been about more than the finished object. It is the material, the tools, the surroundings and the concentration that comes with working through a process.

It is also the conversations that happen while people are making something together.

The workshop begins before the first stitch

Someone asks a question. Someone discovers they can do something they didn’t expect to manage. Someone else becomes so absorbed in their work that they suddenly realise how much time has passed.

Those moments are part of a workshop too.

The workshop begins before the first stitch. It begins when you walk through the door, take in the smell of leather and start paying attention.

Perhaps that is why a good workshop stays with you even after you’ve left.

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