Crafts

Leather Crafting

Also Known As Leatherworking

Citation Formats

General Reference

Home, Crafts and Hobbies Atlas. "Leather Crafting." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://home.interactiveatlas.org/crafts/leather-crafting.

APA Style

Home, Crafts and Hobbies Atlas. (n.d.). Leather Crafting. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://home.interactiveatlas.org/crafts/leather-crafting

BibTeX

@misc{home,craftsandhobbiesatlas-leather-crafting,
  author = {Home, Crafts and Hobbies Atlas},
  title = {Leather Crafting},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://home.interactiveatlas.org/crafts/leather-crafting},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Making things from tanned hide: cutting, saddle stitching, tooling, carving, dyeing and burnishing. Belts, bags, wallets, saddles and bookbindings all come from the same small kit of knives, awls, needles and stamps, and hand-stitched leather still outlasts its machine-made equivalent, which is why the hobby thrives.

Facts

Craft Class

Leather 1

Earliest Evidence (Circa)

Tanning proper, using plant materials to convert hide into leather rather than simply working raw skins, is attested at Mehrgarh in what is now Pakistan between roughly 7000 and 3300 BC. 2

Origin

The oldest surviving tanned-leather footwear is a single shoe roughly 5,500 years old from the Areni-1 cave in Armenia, but the practice of tanning itself is older still, carried out at Mehrgarh over a thousand years earlier. 2

Cross-Tradition Connections

Tools Used

Awl

Leather Punch

Source Leather Punch (Wikipedia)

Skiving Knife

Source Skiving (Leathercraft) (Wikipedia)

Sources

1. Leather Crafting (Wikipedia)

Wikimedia FoundationView the Source

2. Tanning (Leather) (Wikipedia)

Wikimedia Foundationen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanning_(leather)

Quote, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanning_(leather)

Extant vegetable oil tanned leather footwear, from the neolithic (c. 5,500-year-old), has been found in Areni-1 cave, of Vayots Dzor province of Armenia

View the Source

2. Tanning (Leather) (Wikipedia)

Wikimedia Foundationen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanning_(leather), Mehrgarh section

Quote, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanning_(leather), Mehrgarh section