Somewhere between honey brown and dark brown

A Black woman wearing a denim shirt is carrying a bicycle down a set of stairs in an urban environment. The bicycle has a green paint job and honey leather wrapped handlebars.

Original, unique designs to help with lifting and carrying your bicycle

Lifetime leather bar wraps in five styles for every type of handlebar and bicycle

A woman bicycling on a bright summer day over a green lawn wearing suede fringe cowgirl boots and with a 6-pack of Anchor Steam beer connected to the top tube of her bicycle with a honey leather 6-pack frame cinch

Best-selling "commuter essentials" for making the daily commute easier

A dark brown leather round, barrel-shaped saddle bag with cedar wood sides mounted to the back of a brown leather Brooks saddle on a cream-and-brown painted bicycle

Stunning handcrafted bicycle bags carry the essentials and turn heads!

Two people playing a game of travel cribbage on a wooden picnic table with a small leather and birch cribbage board

Our original best-selling Travel Cribbage Boards have fans worldwide

Two sets of travel dice on a dark brown leather table surface. Both sets show six dice coming out of a square brass tube. The dice are 7mm, smaller than standard. One has white dice and the other has black dice.

Play dice anywhere you go in a handcrafted brass keychain or necklace.

Two people playing dominoes using small, domino-sized playing cards on a walnut wood table with snacks and drinks. The domino cards are double 12 with different colors for each number and hand-drawn.

Uniquely functional for travel: hand-drawn domino playing cards (2 sizes!)

Close-up of a folding leather travel backgammon board mid-play on a weathered wood surface. A hand is reaching in and moving four game pieces (which are brass nails) between triangles, which are laser-engraved in the honey dyed leather. Accessories are visible, dice and doubling cube and peg storage

Our newest folding leather board and favorite game: Travel Backgammon!

A variety of handcrafted leather and wood handles on a sample board as seen from above and an angle

Leather handles in 8 styles, 4 leather colors, and 3 metal finishes

A white chest of drawers in a white and lilac baby nursery with three colors of leather Morrison bin pull handles, in Honey, Dark Brown, and Black

Strong yet soft, durable and sustainable, no-bumps and no-bruises

A white kitchen drawer under a gray countertop that has a natural tan colored leather handle with nickel hardware and an engraved label that says 'Silverware'

Add a label to handles and pulls for superior organization

Two cabinet doors swinging open towards each other with matching leather Lovejoy loop handles. The leather touches so the cabinets don't crash into each other, a solution for problem corners in kitchen design planning

Flexible but sturdy, creative solutions to tricky problem corners

A roll of natural leather on a white background

We wrote a free educational series about our favorite material, delivered to your inbox.

Valerie and Geoff from Walnut Studiolo are standing on a pile of driftwood between two boulders on the North Oregon Coast beach near Manzanita, with mountains and grey sky in the background

About Us

A long dark brown leather blueprint tube is shown on a long countertop being hand stitched together by Geoff, whose stitching hands are in the background

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Valerie and Geoff Franklin of Walnut Studiolo standing behind their bicycles on a grassy green lawn. Geoff is doffing his hat to Valerie and she is smiling, as a gesture of service.

Customer Service

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by admin
July 16, 2014
2 min read

An alert reader noticed these pictures of a custom project we did for another customer on our Flickr page and wondered about the color.

Customer Bike Photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/47514124@N02/6307649636/in/set-72157627951882775/lightbox/ This was a custom color job for a customer, and we call this "light brown". It's somewhere in between our two standard colors that we call "honey" and "dark brown".

Walnut Studiolo Standard Leather Colors We picked the colors of honey and dark brown for our leather bicycle accessories to match Brooks saddles as best we can - our honey matches their honey pretty well, and our dark brown matches their brown pretty well. Brooks makes a great saddle, and we want to compliment it. But sometimes you don't have a Brooks, or you're going for a different look, this customer was. To keep the quality and sheen of our leather, we use exclusively oil-based dye, not acrylic "dye" (really, it's more like paint). The oil-based dye has less color options than acrylic. It has many shades of brown, a few natural tone colors, and one or two brighter colors, which we don't stock. Here is our color strip, which includes the "light brown" we used for his bike:

Leather Oil Dye Color Strip The thing with natural, vegetable-tanned leather is that it takes color differently, and that goes for both our products and Brooks saddles, so the exact shade of each can be slightly different on each piece. In the end, it's not a big deal because all veg-tan leather darkens with time and use. And if you want to darken it a shade, it's easy to do, but it's not easy to lighten a shade.