Leather is a perennial favorite with many jewelry makers.  It is easy to understand why.  The natural material is warm to the touch and wonderful to work with.  One international supplier of fabulous leather cord is the German company, Endless Leather. They do both retail and discounted volume sales.


What strikes me about their supplies is the range and quality. They supply many different types of leather cords, round and flat.  Shown below is some leather and findings they recently sent to me for review.

New for them are the pastel camouflage suede leather cords (below left). Something very unusual is the metallic gold and black reptile print cord (below right).  Both these types of cords consist of fine stitched leather with a cotton center, making them much for flexible than if they were solidly leather.  The magnetic clasps were impressive and included both shiny and brushed metal ones.


I thought the subtle colors of the camouflage suede were well suited for designs with gemstones as you can see with my donut pendant necklace.  The grey camouflage suede picked up the patchy grey on this gemstone.


If you don't know what gemstone it is, and I don't, it is probably safe to say it is a quartz. Most of the common gemstones we use fall into this huge category.


As you can see, I came up with a new way to wire the cord on.   I also had to wire the cords together with another length of wire behind the gemstone as well as to the wire wrapped part. This leather cord is certainly thick enough to balance the size of this donut. 


I was pretty impressed with the magnetic clasp.  The magnet was very strong and I had difficulty pulling it apart. I will be testing it out with this unusually heavy donut necklace to see how well it endures.


The braided leather made for a super simple unisex design with an animal print Samunnat Nepal polymer clay slider (courtesy of Kazuri West).

I really liked the wide magnetic clasp.  The pin design makes it more secure.  Once I knew how to open it, putting it on and taking it off was easy.


Some time ago, I was so taken with the look, that I bought some pretty printed leather from them. As you can see adding sliders makes the designs pop!  Clean and simple designs are any occasion wearable.  These are incredibly fast and easy to make.  But fitting leather bracelets accurately can be awkward. So tune in later this week for the tutorial on how to measure and make leather bracelets with any clasp!  




Some of you may recall I also used a stitched leather cord from Endless Leather for the tagua bead and button necklace (below) I made last fall. Other past designs using leather from Endless Leather are :


Giveaway 
If you'd like to win  $50 worth of leather jewelry supplies from Endless Leather, please make a comment below.  Make sure you leave contact info below if you do not have an online shop or blog.  
Email subscribers need to scroll down the post they receive, click on Share Comment and enter your comment. Pick Name/URL. If you don't have a store or blog, leave the URL blank.

This giveaway is international.

Extra entries if you become or are a blog subscriber or follower etc. If you also do shout outs about this giveaway, those will count as additional entries too! Please say so in the comments.

It ends in a week's time at 6 pm EST Monday,  January 19 , 2015 . I will pick the winner randomly and announce the results as soon as possible after. So be sure to leave a contact email if you don't have an online link or make sure you come back and check! Otherwise I will redraw in a week. Good luck!

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Original Post by THE BEADING GEM
Jewelry Making Tips - Jewelry Business Tips