Guys, guys, guys!! Tandy leather just released a new veg-tan, chrome-free leather series that has gorgeous, bright colors. LASERED GARMENT LEATHER, HERE I COME! (If it turns out to laser well–which is a big if.)
Tandy says, “These extremely soft cowhides offer an amazing sense of luxury. Just one touch and you will be sold. They are exceptionally pliable with a beautiful pebbled grain. Whether you are making garments, handbags or other fashion accessories, you will be very pleased with this high-end leather. This leather is veg-tanned from free range cattle which could account for some holes and range marks to be present. Chrome free.”
Weight/Thickness: 2.5 to 3 oz. (1 to 1.2 mm)
Average size: 18 to 20 sq. ft. (1.67 to 1.85 sq. meters)
Here is the colors list:
Right now they’re selling for $190 per hide, so about $10/square foot. When I have a Forge or other access to a laser, I’ll experiment and report back.
LOL All I can picture is free range cattle poking each other lol. On a serious note - maybe I’ll swing by the Tandy store and see if they have or will stock it.!
Leather is something I’m not interested in working with - it’s expensive and I don’t know anything about it and rumor has it that it smells But my niece has told all her friends that I’m going to make her custom leather flip flops, so now I’m going to have to learn enough to make an eleven year old some flip flops.
I have a feeling that once she knows leather comes in more than just cow colored, I’ll be making an entire shoe collection!
Wow! I’m on their mailing list and didn’t even see that! Can’t wait to hear how it lasers. I wonder if Tandy has heard of the thousands of potential new customers coming soon?
great information, could use that stuff and make chess boards, backgammon boards and inlays for game table tops.
you guys are costing me cash, giving me all these ideas.
When my dad worked at the shoe factory, before when there were 80 shoe factories in Missouri, we would get lots of scrap leather. I remember him talk about prime Argentine leather, that it was more expensive and better. He told me because they had open ranges and didn’t have all their cattle in barbed wire fields so fewer nicks. Interesting that free range here means not confinement rather that true free range.
That is interesting–I thought they meant that free range cattle had more marks because they were likely to pick up more scars from brush, run-ins with predators, stumbles on rough terrain, etc.
I grew up on a cattle ranch with wide open spaces (like most of a mile) between fences, and plenty of our neighbors leased federal land, which truly was “free range” because you couldn’t fence or develop it. The range cattle definitely had the rougher go of it. Our land had been grazed since the 1860s, so it had nicely established paths (cow roads) worn into it, the brushy areas were bunched up, the lower branches of the trees were all broken off at about cow-height, and the herds went to watering troughs of an evening. The range cattle always looked scruffy because they were constantly pushing through briar patches, getting jabbed with tree branches, and plowing through unbroken bottom land to get to water sources. Our cows got a lot of petting and doctoring too, because our ranch hand (my Great Aunt Edna) was on the land checking over the herds almost every day, and we fed them hay in drought years (pretty much every year in California). The range cattle had to scrap up what they could.
I’d imagine that the range terrain in Argentina might be particularly nice to the cows–nice flat grassy areas (pampas, right?) instead of the rough-range of California, Montana, Wyoming, and Texas.
The cattle I worked with managed to get holes in them pretty frequently. They’re kinda dumb. All the (tiny) holes and scars and marks on good leather are my favorite part. It gives them character that gets lost on “corrected grain” leather sides.
The idea of brightly colored leather with obvious range marks makes me happy.
But my niece has told all her friends that I’m going to make her custom leather flip flops, so now I’m going to have to learn enough to make an eleven year old some flip flops.
