I love making leather crafts and accessories, as you may know (1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10/11/12/13/14/15/16/17/18/19). It's a great material for long-lasting goods that look better with wear. It's not terribly expensive, and especially affordable if you're picking up scraps from a local upholstery shop (doing that is also very environmentally friendly - keeping good scraps from the trash). But there's no way to cut out leather quickly or perfectly without a few tools in your arsenal. I've found that cutting it with nice scissors, nice-side down gives a much nicer edge than cutting it regularly. I was curious to see how the Epic 6/L Letterpress would handle leather, so I gave it a try using their knotty and nice kit. It's pretty good. You need to work with 1.5 ounce leather or thinner, but that kind of leather isn't too hard to come by. You'll want to search for garment weight. Here are some suggestions:

pig splits | economy suede | gold lambskin | minelli sides | sheepskin

You'll also want to remove the squishy padding from the die and add a piece of cardstock on top of the leather. It helps cut the leather all the way through. Even if it didn't cut the leather all the way through, it was easy to finish my job with scissors. At least the die left a nice embossed edge along the top.

The top leather is a lambskin and the bottom is a cheap decorative suede that I found for 99¢ per square foot. It's pretty ugly as a hide, but after making it into a bow, I'm liking this a lot more. I love how the gold peeks out of the inside of the bow. With the one die cut I made a pin, a hair clip, a fascinator and a pony holder. I'm pretty stoked about using these. Penelope is, too. I was unsure how a necklace would work or if the bow would stay in place, but because it's made out of a heavier leather, it lays quite nicely. I made 7 bow-related accessories in about an hour. A great bang for your time/buck if you're doing gift swaps this year, or planning out a bunch of girlfriend gifts. I couldn't resist putting this bow in Penelope's hair this morning. She loves it. She also loves her new thrifted "saved by the bell" glasses. Or is that an Erkel reference? I can't quite remember. But they're hilarious and awesome. Now to figure out how to make my own custom dies. *This post is not sponsored. Product provided by Lifestyle crafts.