What Is Leather?

Leather is the skin or hides of animals, cured by a process called tanning to prevent decay and to give it flexibility and toughness.

Leather has been used by all societies and primitive peoples. Early groups of people preserved pelts with grease and smoke and used them for shoes, garments, coverings, tents, containers, and anything else they could think of including armour.

Today pelts are prepared for tanning by dehairing, usually with lime, followed by fleshing and cleaning.

After Tanning

After tanning, the leather is usually treated with fats to make it supple.

Shaving leather to the required thickness was abandoned early in the 18th century after the invention of a machine that split the tanned leather into a flesh layer and a grain (hair-side) layer.

Skivers are thin, soft grains used for linings and for covering firm surfaces.

Characteristic grains may be brought out by rubbing, as in Morocco leather (goatskin), or by embossing. Many cool leather designs have used finishes including glazing, coloring with stains or dyes, enameling or lacquering as for patent leather, and sueding, buffing with emery or carborundum wheels to raise a nap, usually on the flesh side.

Russia Leather

Russia leather, originally vegetable-tanned calfskin dressed with birch oil that had a distinct odor and was often dyed red with brazilwood, is a term that now covers a number of variants.

Rawhide is untanned.

Cordovan, or Spanish, leather, are soft, colored leathers made at Córdoba during the Middle Ages and often richly modeled and gilded, is imitated for wall coverings, panels, and screens.

Leather has been used in for bookbinding for hundreds of years and still is.

Artificial or faux leather has been made since about 1850, was originally a strong fabric coated with a rubber composition or with a synthetic substance such as pyroxylin. Since World War II, materials made from vinyl polymers have far outstripped the earlier artificial leathers in commercial importance.

Knowledge is power and you now have the power to make informed decisions when buying cool leather designs!