Lookit this - a whole forum dedicated to working with leather - this is gonna be my new online home!
I've long wanted to get into creating my own small leather goods and handbags, and as per an earlier post am currently paying off a rather expensive industrial sewing machine with this in mind. Eternally jumping the gun, I've meanwhile been shopping already for leather. There are a good few leather tanners selling hides on ebay, and I've so far bought 4 roo skins and a few cow hides too, including a rather stunning chrome tanned red one that's almost flawless!
Well having my leather already, I last night tried sewing with my Janome and a small piece of the thinnest kangaroo leather. This leather is incredibly soft and only 0.6mm thick, so just about as domestic machine friendly as you can get. I bought a pack of leather sewing needles and put a brand new one of those on, so it's not punching with a blunt steel, and gave it a whirl.
Firstly, when I sew slowly there's not enough oomph to cleanly break through the skin. It gets through if I'm going medium speed, and if I go too fast it drops stitches. If I'm going carefully and slowly I have to be careful not to go too slow or it goes nnnnngghhhh and I can feel it breaking into a sweat trying to push through!
Secondly, I need compound feed. That's what my machine-to-be has, it has a walking foot and a needle feed as well as ye olde feed dogs underneath, so the material / leather is being pulled through by mechanisms above it as well as from below. Janome of course just has the pooches, so only the bottom layer is being pulled. The top layer of this soft leather gets pushed backwards and stretched out by the foot, and because this soft leather is so stretchy it gets out of shape after only a few inches of sewing!
It's been a handy and very illuminating experiment.. when I told MrFrankie the price of the Highlead industrial I'm lemming he just about choked on his tea. Now at least he sees what the limitations are with this one, and all I'm trying to sew is a very basic pouch in which to put my rayon threads and bobbins, just to keep them separate from the cotton and poly/cotton threads. I haven't even folded over any seams, not even by the zipper, so all it was sewing through was two layers max of soft leather!
I did cross over a couple of seams so that it was 3 and then 4 layers thick, and nada - no go. She just couldn't punch through, I had to handwheel her through the stitches, a pain when I needed both hands free really to position the leather pieces. When we were talking to his Aunt on Skype the other night we all got talking sewing, and I told her of the machine I'm getting. It's 0.75HP.. I did the conversions into watts, and compared it to the Janome's stats on it's power label.. it comes out as 7x more powerful! The Janome is 85W, pretty standard for domestic machine, whereas the 0.75HP Highlead converts to 560W!! Rrrraawwwwrrrr!!! 
Anyway, it'll be awhile yet before I get my Highlead, so in the meantime I'll try a few tips I picked up online and from the Leatherworker Forums. I'm going to have fun going through all the information on those boards, and having read through a few threads I've found everyone seems lovely and genuinely keen to help eachother out. Just as well, given the amount of impending questions I have to ask.....!
