Riveted Woven Belt
The leather store near our workshop always stocks large bins of scrap - production offcuts from across the country. The surface quality of the leather is usually great so I was inspired to make products with it. The issue is that leather from different parts of the hide has different stretch properties which pose unique challenges for making functional objects. After months of testing various solutions I found that a woven belt solves this issue in two ways. Firstly by using an 8 strand braid I leveraged the collective strength of many similar parts. Also, crucially, the woven pattern creates a mechanical stretch across the whole belt that makes stretchiness in any individual strand insignificant.
Craftmanship
Scrap leather is collected and sorted by color and thickness. Leather scrap commonly comes from the edges of the hide. By studying the shape, a good guess can usually be made as to exactly where a particular scrap was located on the animal
After sorting the pieces are broken down into uniform strips using a laser cutter. The laser creates charring on the edges so at this point the leather is also cleaned
The strips are joined at the edges with rivets - ready to be hand woven into products. Using this method allows us to take in scrap of any shape and size and use it to create perfectly uniform strips of a specific length
