Horace Thomas & Shawn Thomas

I’ve been a full time, self-employed leather smith for forty-one years and my son has been a part of the business since he was two months old. Currently we tend to divide our work into areas that each of us enjoys most. I do more of the actual creation and fabrication, and Shawn likes to do more of the selling and traveling. Much of the time we both meet in the middle and we each do all of the tasks necessary for creative leathersmithing and making a humble but happy living. My personal favorite job is using architectural design methods to build unique shapes into practical leather bags. Recently I developed a way of layering and cutting leather using miter techniques. This enables me to build shapes with compound curves that have never been done by any leather smith. Currently I am also having great fun discovering and developing a contemporary process for transferring my original artwork permanently onto leather.