Cutting leather is apparently not as simple as I thought.  The other day I was was cutting a pattern out of some leather for a project and could not figure out why the pieces that I so carefully marked out would not match together.  This was really bugging the snot out of me so I took a closer look at what was happening to the leather when it was cut, and noticed that the the leather was being stretched and deformed by the shears I was using.  I am pretty sure that this is common knowledge among leather workers, but I don’t have an expert at my disposal to teach me the ins and outs of  leather work.  Heck I often don’t even know the right questions to ask until I ruin something and wonder what I did wrong.

Of course once I see something going wrong I can get clues for what to Google and I often learn something new from the experience.  In this case I learned that a sharp curved blade or specialty shears are used by the experts to cut leather.  From there my research lead me to tools like the Craftsman trimming knife and a Japanese carving/marking tool called a “Kiridashi”

When I saw Carters version I figured  that I could whip one up pretty quickly.  Of course mine is not forged with laminated steel, I did however have a left-over piece of CPM 154 steel that was too small for most anything else.  In the end the cost to produce my Kiridashi was much less then even the $30 Craftsman trimmer with the added bonus of more experience at the grinder.  This is what I would call a win win situation.