The fact that I use only remnants makes it OK, right?*

Although I still buy leather shoes, using a leather bag just feels like reaching into the body of a lifeless animal with its guts scooped out. But why, then, is sewing with leather so awesome? Cutting the skins with my sharp Gingher scissors nauseates me -- it's way too fluid and easy. It reminds me of when I sliced a chunk out of the fleshy part of my left index finger without feeling any resistance in the scissors, without even noticing -- until I saw my dead tissue stuck to the stainless steel blade as blood ran down my hand. eeeewwwww. Sewing with leather is like reading Kathryn Harrison -- visceral.

Not only is it gross, sewing with leather is hard because all of the little needle punctures remain after you make a mistake, so you really can't make a mistake. Back to the grossness, this is also gross, because I imagine sewing through living skin and having blood emerge from each puncture. And I think of Ed Gein and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Also, it's hard to maneuver leather through my sewing machine, and sewing it by hand is impossible and also gross.

But white leather is so groovy. And in working with it I've begun to appreciate all the things about leather that people have loved forever: its heft and its drape and its flaws and the ways it evolves and even the fact that it's skin. [eeeewwww]

In any case, along with my preexisting plans to reupholster the drafting chair in white leather and to experiment with leather piping on a fabric pillow and a fabric-covered hairpin-legged foot stool [did I just write "hairpin-legged foot"?], I'm totally inspired by the simple rawness of these pieces from http://truck-furniture.co.jp/, which, somehow, honors the beauty and horror of the material:

Also, this is the fabric I'm using to make a pillow and reupholster the footstool:

(It's mondo black from reprodepot: http://reprodepot.com/mondoblack.html; not really simple nor raw at all.)

* I'm writing this while I have two deep, long, infected cuts on my leg from a retractable dog leash. The constant awareness of a painful gaping wound contributes, at least partly, to the gruesome physicality today, I think.