Discovering a Love of Making.
My journey with leatherwork started in 1991 at the Minnesota Renaissance Faire. My 14-year-old self spent the day wandering the faire with my family looking wide-eyed at the vast array of creativity and quality on display from the various crafters. I fixated on a pair of leather vambraces decorated with an embossed image of a celtic phoenix. With a little convincing (begging), my mother purchased them for me.
Years later, on the long drive home from the Kansas City Renaissance Festival, my mother and I enjoyed the experience so much that we decided to try having a shop of our own. I was studying jewelry and metals at the University of Northern Iowa, having discovered an affinity for making fine (shiny!) things. In 1999, we had our shop open for the first time at a tent faire in Osceola, IA. We had a handful of cloaks that my mother had sewn, and a haphazard array of leather goods I had assembled from some scraps and hardware pieces purchased from the local craft store. We sold them out of a nylon dining canopy from Wal-Mart.
Two decades later, Hammer and Thread Leatherwork sells at some of the largest and most reputable renaissance faires in the midwest, where our name has come to mean quality, durability, and elegance in design.
The original plan was that I would make leather wares until I could afford the tools for metalwork, but I found leatherwork too much to my liking. I’ve been a carny, a systems administrator, a graphic designer, a programmer, an IT Director, and a screen printer, but nothing has stuck with me as much as leatherwork. In May of 2019, I left all the others behind to make Hammer and Thread my full-time career.
(I did buy the metalworking tools. They sit quietly in a corner of my basement workshop in Des Moines, IA, poised and ready should I need them.)
Few materials can combine utilitarian ruggedness, beauty, and longevity the way that leather does. I strive for all of my designs to be as useful, attractive, and long-lasting as the materials from which they are made.
I will, from time to time, warn mothers who buy things from me for their sons what they may be starting. ;)
