If you are working with leather, it is essential to reduce waste. The less wasted materials you have, the more money that you will have in your pocket at the end of the day. Here are some easy ways for reducing waste from leather craft in Leather Workshop Singapore .
- Use scrap pieces for stitching and punching holes in designs
- Keep scraps together so they can be reused later
- Create templates out of old books
- Utilize other materials such as fabric or paper when appropriate
- Make use of upholstery needles carefully by sewing multiple stitches on one hole if possible, avoid using a cutting mat while working on a design that has already been drawn on the leather.
In addition, you should also be aware that leather is not biodegradable and it can take up to a hundred years for regular trash to decompose. It is thus best to avoid throwing any scraps of the material into your rubbish bins as they will end up in landfills or incinerators where they will release harmful toxins such as dioxin.
If this still concerns you because you are working with heavy-duty projects that involve large pieces of leather, then make sure that all scrap pieces have been properly trimmed before disposing of them off so that no traces remain behind.
The next step would be designing templates out of old books which could help save both cost and paper when cutting patterns from sheets of expensive paper goods such as cardstock.
Another way to help reduce waste is by designing your patterns instead of using templates that are already available online but which come with the risk of resembling someone else’s work accidentally or not being able to find a matching size template for what you want to make.
A good idea would be also printing out images from Google Images and scanning them to scale these onto paper-good such as card stock so they can be used when cutting pattern pieces from sheets of expensive material like sandpaper.