Originally Posted by
miriam
The issues will be thread weight, needle size and thickness of your leather. You can make tension adjustments to accommodate the thicker threads and buy the correct size leather needle to match your thread. I put a hand crank on a very old Singer 15 to sew leather - it worked but I was worn out. If you do much leather sewing an old walking foot or needle feed industrial would be the way to go.
I was wondering since I saw some really cool duffle bags, all leather, that looked pretty simple to make and would not cost me anywhere near the $700-1200 price tags! I have a bunch of sons and thought would be cool gifts for them. Then got thinking maybe handsewn purses for the daughters. I really only would need the zippers sewn as could do rest with handstitching (not as hard as sounds) and could probably have done by local shoe repair guy. Thanks for the input!