Picking up a new hobby is always an interesting experience. It’s not usually very fun being bad at something, and most worthwhile pursuits have an investment of time and effort required to get the hang of them. Around a year ago I made the spontaneous decision to buy a few hundred bucks worth of leather-working tools and supplies, pretty much on a flight of fancy, which I felt like I would surely regret a month or two later when (as I suspected) I would get bored and move on to something else. Whimsy giveth and whimsy taketh away. And while the hours I commit to my new hobby can vary dramatically from week to week and month to month, I found this new practice taught me a few valuable lessons, and even better, the practice resulted in physical objects for me to keep and use. So let’s take a look at my brief creative journey and the lessons I’ve learned – maybe it’ll make you want to give it a try too, or pick up that other hobby you’ve been hoping to start.
Starting out I was full of gumption and ambition. I had all sorts of ideas for how to stamp designs into leather, tricks I could try, and ultimately, an Etsy store I could open to start my own leather-working business! I got a starter pack on Amazon filled with cheap tools, a baggy of (pretty useless) scrap leather from Michael’s, a leather hole puncher I didn’t need because the set came with some, and a big box of x-acto knives I never used because a simple box-cutter did the trick just fine once I changed the razor. Then some veg-tan leather on Amazon that I could actually use, and we were away! As is often the case, maybe I put the (shopping) cart before the horse a bit, and my initial investment then turned into me buying a 3D printer which, I assured myself, would have many uses besides stamping designs onto leather. New hobbies can be as cheap or expensive as you make them, but clearly that money was burning a hole in my pocket – and while I don’t expect to break even on my investment any time soon, I’m happy to swallow that cost.
Lesson 1: Buy tools as you need them, not before. If you’re new, you likely won’t know what your needs are anyway, or what makes a tool good.
Let me divert a little from my journey to briefly discuss something that had been on my mind the last few years. Perhaps me dipping my toes into leather-working wasn’t entirely a flight of fancy. The idea of meaning, and what it meant to live a good and happy life, has been something I’ve spent a lot of time trying to properly understand. Hubert Dreyfus, in his book All Things Shining, discusses the modern nihilistic problem that comes from an increasing lack of sacred things in our lives. Many things have lost their spiritual weight in the face of an increasingly scientific and skeptical world. Meaning has become less prescriptive and more subjective – in a way that is liberating, leaving us to find what is personally meaningful, but it also left a void. That void, in the cold face of nihilism, is that nothing is meaningful, at least not intrinsically. That void, Dreyfus argued, could be filled with a new sanctity. That of the craftsman, *poiesis, “*the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.” To Dreyfus, the craftsman’s task is not to generate meaning, but to cultivate the skill for discerning meaning.
Picking up a craft allows us a glimpse into the depths, nuances and complexities of the world. We test our skill against reality, and we cannot so easily pretend to succeed when we fail. The woodworker forms an intimate knowledge of his tools and his subject, the properties of the materials he uses, how to manipulate it and how to work in tandem with it. In Dreyfus’ words:
“It is because the craftsman is an intelligent observer of wood and not a ruthless and unintelligent machine, that the wood can reveal to him its subtle virtues. But it is because the wood has these virtues already that the craftsman can cultivate in himself the skill for discerning them and ultimately can come to feel reverence and responsibility for the wood and where it lives. There is, therefore, a kind of feedback loop between craftsman and craft: each jointly cultivates the other into a state of mutual understanding and respect. We have seen the name Aristotle gave to this dual cultivation of craftsman and craft. He called it poiesis.”
My poiesis journey began by my trying to make a simple card holder wallet. The plan was simple: 3 square cuts of leather stitched together. A front pocket and a back pocket for cards. Child’s play. After breaking a few inadequate needles (and my poor thumbs) trying to push through three layers of thick leather, I learned to resort to a pair of pliers to yank them through. I realized after stitching that I should have dyed it first, so that I didn’t dye over the stitching and so that the inside of the card sleeves wasn’t the flesh-tone of veg tan while the outside was dyed… After dying it, I realized some glue had gotten onto the leather, leaving unsightly blotches. So, for my first real project, this beauty was born. Oh, by the way, I didn’t account for the stitching making the actual clearance smaller, so it didn’t even fit cards.
Lesson 2: Your first attempt will almost always suck.
This leads me to a concept called the Law of Diminishing Returns. This is an economic principle that suggests that as investment in an area increases, the rate of increase in output will eventually taper off. You could say that somebody with 10,000 hours making leather wallets might make a wallet 20% better than the guy with 5,000, because the early investments of skill go into high-return things, and then as you go on the improvements become more subtle. This can feel a bit discouraging, that you can put in so much extra work for an increasingly small return, but from the bottom of that curve I like to call it the “Law of getting way better at something pretty quick” – I coined that term, so you better credit me! Anyway, what I’m driving at here is that as a beginner you have so much to learn – it can be overwhelming, but it also means you’ve got a few lessons that will make your product ten times better, or your process twice as fast, without too much fuss. Those early wins can be great. Most skills have some fundamentals that pay dividends, and in leather-working I found that getting a bit better at planning my piece, measuring it right, cutting it better, learning how to saddle stitch better and dye leather all made my projects look way better.
This was my third wallet. It has its flaws – the stitching isn’t perfect and I ran out of thread before I ran out of holes. But you gotta admit it looks better than the first one, and by a fair bit. I still use this wallet, too, and it does the job pretty decently!
Lesson 3: Your first project might suck, but that just means it’s really, really easy for your next attempt to be way better.
While I’m sharing, here’s a couple more projects I’m proud of. You can tell because I put some production value into the photos.
Over the course of my brief leather-working stint, I’ve made myself a few notebooks, a wallet, some mason jar sleeves, some bookmarks, and some coasters. I’ve made gifts for friends, and even gotten a few requests. I’ve also made some odds and ends like a pen holder for my fridge and some fastener clasps. A few went in the scrap pile and got chalked up to learning experiences, but a fair few I still use. Nowadays whenever I want something, I briefly consider whether it can be made out of leather, and if it can, maybe I can do it myself. This brings us to another lesson
Lesson 4: by learning to make things YOU want to have, the craft you invest in has an added reward. And that reward will remain to remind you of your job well done.
I still feel a bit of a warm fuzzy feeling when I use my notebook, or wallet, or mason jar mug, because I made it, and I’m proud of it. And if something about it annoys me, I can make it again, better, to my own specifications. Perhaps I’m being a bit self indulgent, but please permit me, because I think it’s an important lesson – having a craft that’s useful to you, that you can take some pride in, is immensely satisfying. Despite the frustration of being a beginner – and I’m still very much a beginner – the joy of making something, of bringing something into being, is very real and very motivating. For years I’ve enjoyed intellectual pursuits like research, reading and writing, as well as martial arts like Judo and Jiu Jitsu, but a paper on happiness won’t hold my credit card for me, and the sickest arm-bar in the world won’t help keep my coffee warm in the morning. I don’t think anybody wants me giving them either of those things for their birthday, either. This was something different, something extra, and it made me look at the world around me and continuously wonder – could I make that myself?
So I posted most of my pictures on here, but I also have an instagram that you can check out at https://www.instagram.com/eudaimoncrafts/ if you’re interested!
Citations:
Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Sean Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. 1st Free Press hardcover ed. New York: Free Press, 2011. – Amazon Link
