Beaded Leather Cuff

I love, love, love the look of leather cuffs! They are so popular in fashion jewelry right now. I wanted to try my hand at making my own version. I ended up with this little number right here! It's so soft and comfy to wear! I know little about leather working, it's something I'd be very interested in learning sometime. I just fudged around a little to make this one. I did have a pretty clear plan of how I was going to go about making it and just followed that all the way through.

I picked up some nice genuine leather scraps I found at the craft store and some heavy-duty closure snaps from the fabric store. I wanted a leather punch to make holes in the leather for the beads, but the ones I saw were way to large for what I needed for this project. I ended up using a tiny, tiny paper punch that I had already. This hole punch makes about a 1mm hole. It worked OK, not great, but doable.

The first thing I did to make the cuff was I made myself a template out of some card stock. I measured everything out VERY carefully, including extra space at the ends for the snap closure and measuring and marking out all of the holes along the cuff for the beading. This cuff is 1" wide and 71/2'' long, but fits like a 7" because of the snap overlap. Once I had my template measured out perfect, I cut it out and punched out the hole marks on the template. Then, I traced the template onto the wrong side of the leather and marked all of the holes with a pen. I cut the leather out with just a nice pair of fabric shears, cuts like a dream! Then, I just punched out the hole marks with that little paper punch, cleaned up the holes a little with a small pair of sewing scissors and added on the heavy-duty fabric snap, following the directions it came with. Now, I had my leather cuff base! Lastly, I threaded some waxed linen cord through the holes and tied on some Sodalite roundels and Thai silver accent beads with square knots and frayed the ends of the linen.