14 Jul Why I No Longer Work with Animal Leather (and What I Found on the Other Side)

  For years, my hands knew leather before they knew anything else. I knew how to place every pattern to use every last centimetre. I could tell the quality and type of leather just by touch. I could tell a good hide from a mediocre one, and even the animal it came from, just by running my hand over it. I was good at it. And that's exactly why, over time, I stopped being able to do it. It wasn't some lightning-bolt revelation. There was no single moment where I decided to change my life. It grew slowly, the way anything grows that you can't keep ignoring. Every time I held a hide in my hands, I thought about the animal it had been....