My first experience working with leather came during an afternoon at my grandfather’s studio when I was in middle school. My grandfather, Tony Ferrara, is a fashion designer and growing up he always made it his priority to teach me what he knew about sewing and design, despite my frequent reluctance at the materials he chose for us to use. This time, his choice was metallic gold leather and purple press-on Swarovski crystals, which horrified me at the time, but looking back was pretty damn fabulous. He showed me how to cut, glue, and sew the leather on his heavy-duty power sewing machine and in the end I had a very flashy gold leather cuff complete with purple crystals and snaps. Throughout high school I started becoming more interested in leather accessories and made quite a few of them, but when I got to art school my interest in leather was abandoned for newer experiences with metal and fibers.

To be honest, despite my past experience in working with leather, it has always felt a bit daunting to me as a jeweler. Many of us have had that beginning jewelry assignment where we’re asked to make a pendant, and then are faced with the choice of the cord to hang that pendant on, many of us showing up with a spool of leather and trying to make it look like an intentional, well thought-out cord choice even though we finished the pendant right before crit and the cord was the last thing we thought about… Just me?

Even post-graduation, I’ve often seen other art jewelers using elegant, minimalistic strips of leather to hang their pendants on but always wondered, despite its simplistic beauty, if a leather cord for a pendant could be anything more than just a cut strip. If you know me, I’m a maximalist and “simple” just isn’t in my nature, so I had to figure out a way to use leather in an excessive way that would compliment my work while not overpowering it—reverse applique was the compromise I found that felt the most natural. Hand stitching leather is obviously not a new technique, but it is new to me and my practice and I hope that if you’ve been struggling with thinking of new ways to work with leather as a compliment to your jewelry, that my tutorial can provide some good inspiration! I now use this technique in more than just necklaces and I’ve really fallen in love with how labor-intensive, yet satisfying it is to hand stitch leather in a very visible way. Obviously stitching leather on a sewing machine, though challenging, is still very possible and opens up even more possibilities of ways to use leather, but hand stitching the leather, in my opinion, gives it a completely different quality and bold visual effect that makes all of the extra labor worth it!