There are two kinds of leather on my table, and they are not interchangeable. One of them takes a drawing. The other refuses it, politely and completely.
For years I have worked with both, and the choice is never about which is better. It is about what the piece has to do. But if a piece has a drawing in it, there is no choice at all. It has to be vegetable-tanned leather, and I want to explain why, because it is the part of my work that customers see the result of without ever being told the reason.
What vegetable tanning actually is
Tanning is what turns a hide into leather, into something that will not rot. There are two ways to do it that matter here.
Vegetable tanning uses tannins that come out of bark, wood and leaves. The hides sit in those liquors for weeks, sometimes months, moving slowly from weaker baths to stronger ones. It is the older method by several thousand years, and it is slow in a way that nothing industrial is allowed to be any more. Leather Naturally has a good plain description of the process if you want the technical side of it.
Chrome tanning uses chromium salts and takes about a day. It gives a leather that is soft, supple, holds colour beautifully and drapes well. It is not a lesser material. Most of the leather in the world is chrome-tanned, and for good reason.
The difference that matters to me is what happens inside the fibres. Vegetable-tanned leather stays open to water and to heat. You can dampen it, work it, and it will hold what you put into it. Chrome-tanned leather has been closed in the factory. Press a design into it and it will come back up, the way a mattress does when you get off it.
Where I use it, and where I do not
I use vegetable-tanned leather for the pieces I emboss and for the ones I paint. Everywhere a drawing goes, whether it is pressed in or laid on with a brush, that is the hide underneath it.
The rest of my pieces are chrome-tanned, and that is a deliberate choice too, not a compromise. A bag that has to fall softly against the body, hold a deep colour, take rain without flinching, that bag wants chrome-tanned leather. Asking vegetable-tanned leather to do that job would be like asking a cast-iron pan to be light.
So when you see a piece of mine with a sphere, a wolf, a labyrinth pressed into it, or a painting carried across the front, you are looking at vegetable-tanned leather. When you see a smooth piece in a colour that would be hard to get any other way, you are looking at chrome-tanned.
How the drawing gets in
I draw it first, line by line. Then it goes into the hide through a play of temperature and pressure. Nothing is laid on top. No layer, no film, no ink sitting on the surface waiting to lift at a corner.
On vegetable-tanned leather you can work with heat, but carefully, because it burns. The whole technique sits in the balance between temperature and time. Too little and the drawing does not go in. Too much and the hide is gone, and there is no going back from that. And it is the only leather that can be embossed under pressure. On any other one, the pressure leaves nothing behind.
That is the whole reason the choice of leather is not negotiable. The drawing is not on the leather. It is the leather, transformed.
How I got here
I came into this trade carefully, the way you come into a new house. Quiet at first, not making too much noise, as though breathing too hard might make things fall and break.
I felt I could be myself there, that it could be my house, that I could take up my own space. But I began to feel, more and more sharply, that I needed to bring my own things in. And very quickly I understood that everything of mine did not fit the general line.
I admit I sat for a while on the edge of the chair, with my needs gathered up underneath it, in a corner. And I could feel myself slowly disappearing.
I learned from tutorials, and I am grateful to the people who put them there. But I wanted more. We cannot know one another. We can only approximate. Once you learn that, you begin to respect the limits inside which each of us shows ourselves to the world, honestly or dishonestly.
The engine behind AG Design was curiosity.
I started bringing in techniques from other trades. Etching with acids. Old newspaper. Wire worked into the surface. Building things out in three dimensions. Shaping the leather, trying to stiffen a soft hide, painting on it.
The colours were beautiful. But on something chemically closed in the factory, my imagination had nowhere to go.
That is how I arrived at vegetable-tanned leather. And I found very quickly that on it, anything I can imagine can be made.
With it came the feeling of home. I gathered all my needs up from under the chair and began to furnish pieces of leather.
When I say home, I mean my workshop. It is the place where I can leave marks without apologising for them. It is a former garage. It is the only place I want to be, and the one I leave with the greatest difficulty.
How vegetable-tanned leather ages
It darkens. That is the first thing to know and the thing most people are not prepared for. A pale, honey-coloured piece will be several shades deeper in a year, more if it sees sun. It is not damage. It is the tannins reacting to light and to air, and it is the reason old vegetable-tanned leather has a colour you cannot buy new.
It takes scratches and absorbs them. A mark that would sit on the surface of a coated leather sinks in here and becomes part of the surface within a few weeks of being handled.
And it does not peel. It cannot. There is no coating to come away, because the colour goes through the hide rather than sitting on it. I wrote about that difference at length in The Truth About Vegan Leather, because it is the single thing that separates a material that improves from one that disintegrates.
What it does not like is being soaked and then dried fast, next to a radiator or in the sun. That is the one way to genuinely ruin it. I have written how I care for mine in How to Clean a Leather Bag, and How I Care for Mine.
How to recognise it when you are buying
You will rarely be told. So, four things you can do standing in a shop:
Look at the cut edge. Vegetable-tanned leather is the same colour through the thickness. A coated leather often shows a paler core with a skin of colour on either side.
Put a drop of water on an inconspicuous spot. Vegetable-tanned leather darkens where the drop sits and then evens out as it dries. Coated leather makes the drop sit up like on a waxed car.
Press a fingernail into it. On a lightly finished hide you should get a faint mark that fades within a day. If nothing happens at all, the surface has been sealed.
Smell it. This one is not scientific and it is the one I trust most. Vegetable-tanned leather smells of wood and tea. Chrome-tanned smells cleaner, sharper, more like a new car.
And there is one more, which I used for a long time, though not in a shop and never on a finished piece. I used to test with a flame, on an offcut.
Real leather does not melt. It shrinks, it smells of burnt hair, and what is left behind is an ash that crumbles between your fingers. What is not leather melts, beads up, and smells of plastic.
That test will not tell you how a hide was tanned. It tells you whether you are being lied to, and it answers in about two seconds.
A piece where you can see all of it
Axis Mundi has an armillary sphere pressed into the front, with a Cretan labyrinth around it and CENTRUM COSMOS LABYRINTHUS running along the rim. None of that could exist on another hide. The rings would have lifted, the letters would have gone soft, and the labyrinth would have closed itself up within a month of being carried.
The drawing stays because the leather agreed to keep it.
Everything I live now comes from a choice.
It is simple. As simple as that.
You want a different result? Make a different choice.
The other pieces on the table right now are here.
