What is your name, your leather craft business, and where are you located?
My name is Jim Guthrie. My wife and I live in Denver Colorado and you’ll find my work branded as Guthrie & Co. Which is more of a hopeful shell for a business than a business proper. I’m a hobbyist who sells some of the things I make to finance the rest of my hobby. During the day I work as a Network Engineer.
What types of leather goods do you make, or what is your role in the leather craft business?
Small goods mostly. Wallets. Belts etc. I’m constantly pushing and trying new things though. Shoes and some bags are both on the workbench right now for example.
What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your leather crafting in the last six months (or in recent memory)?
- A straight edge guide for my bell skiver (Fratelli Alberti Part number #1244), I wish this is the guide that would come with skivers by default. It has made the kind of skives common in leathercraft (long, straight skives / strap work) so much easier.
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- A centering ruler – I’m amazed how much it simplifies checking and aligning parts. I wish I would have gotten one sooner.
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How has a setback, or seeming setback, set you up for later success in leather craft? Do you have a “favorite failure”?
I love this question, though I’m not going to answer it directly. Instead I’m going to hop up on a soap box and rant a little bit:
Failure is so integral to growth because it resets your expectations on how you think things work and forces you to reconsider your approach. The more I’ve embraced failure as part of the process rather than a break in it, the more consistent my personal growth has become. To that end, I try and make my failures as bite sized as possible. When you’re learning a new thing, I believe the fastest way to mastery is to create the smallest repeatable scenario possible to test an idea. Swatch, sample, figure out the essential problem you’re trying to solve and only give it as many bones as it needs to test it accurately. This is a skill all by itself.
If you could collaborate with another leather crafter to make an item, which leather crafter would it be and what would you make?
Hmmm! Did this question replace the “make any item you want”? question. I think it did. So I’m going to cheat and answer both because I liked the old question too.
For a collaboration I think I’d want to pull someone from a very different discipline, someone who specializes in western tooling, and blending it seamlessly into a high-end bag would be really cool. Though I couldn’t name a person right off the top of my head.
As for creating any item I wanted with an unlimited budget, I love the idea of doing a large steamer trunk – leather wrapped, brass tacks, birch frame. I’d love to make the locking mechanism and hardware myself from scratch. It’d be a wonderful intersection of woodworking, leatherwork and metalwork for me. The material cost isn’t the big thing there – it’s the tools I think I’d need to get everything done just so.
What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made? (Could be an investment of money, time, energy, etc.)
The time I’ve spent building friendships in the leathercraft community (Largely on the Leathercraft discord – join us here!: https://discord.gg/dUK2Wu) Surrounding myself with like minded, interested, and often far more skilled people has constantly pushed me to improve. I wouldn’t have made it anywhere close to this far without them.
What’s an unusual or odd technique in your process that you’re pretty sure most people don’t do?
Probably not odd in terms of practice, but odd in terms of scope. I’ve adjusted, polished, or modified practically every tool in my shop, including the machines. To get the kind of results I want I must refine my tools for their jobs just as much as the end products they make are.
In the last five years, what new mindset, behavior, or habit has most improved your leather craft?
I definitely came into the craft with some Ideas about not using modern, synthetic materials (thread, tape, reinforcements, even glue in a lot of instances). What I found was that I was limiting myself arbitrarily. It was a great exercise in finding the useful boundary of where leather was useful, but opening my mind up to supplementing leather’s strengths with modern materials is letting my work grow further.
What advice would you give a smart, driven person about to get into leather craft? What advice should they ignore?
Three thoughts:
- Eat your own dogfood. Use the things you make and find out if your designs work and last the way you think they will.
. - The experience of other people should be a valued resource, but it should not define your work. So, try everything for yourself and don’t hinge your skills on someone else’s’ dogma. Embrace the failures and use your own judgement.
. - If you’re trying to sell things online, hire a photographer or learn some rudimentary photography. You don’t need to be an artist with a camera, but you do need well exposed, in-focus photos that represent your work accurately.
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What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?
I don’t know if it’s really a recommendation per se, or my expertise… but I think what irritates me most is anyone disparaging machines (usually as a sales pitch). I think hand skills are wonderful and an excellent investment of time and important to understanding problems. However, there’s a point that it becomes time prohibitive to improving yourself, and producing quality goods at a reasonable rate for most customer bases. Learning the intricacies of bag design and construction is going to take a whole lot longer if you’re stitching by hand instead of using a machine.
Additionally, I think there is a stratum of people who undervalue how much skill can be involved in operating machine, there’s whole unique skill set to using them that can be challenging in it’s own right.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, or have lost your focus temporarily, what do you do? (If helpful: What questions do you ask yourself?)
Before noon I grab another coffee, after noon I’ll grab another Bourbon. Sometimes I take a walk. Sometimes I consult with Merlin The Wise (My orange tabby cat). Any way you slice it I try and take a step away to clear my head for few minutes.
Where can people find you (links to online store, blog, twitter, Instagram, etc.)
You can find me on instagram at @guthrie_leathers, of course on the discord group I mentioned above, and if you’re interested in purchasing some of my work – keep your eyes peeled, the website will be launching in the next few months at https://Guthrie.Co
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