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

When it comes to leathercrafting projects, we wrote the book on it for DK Publishing!

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

Stunning handcrafted bicycle bags carry the essentials and turn heads!

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

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

Our best-selling Original Travel Cribbage Boards has fans worldwide

Unique travel-sized classic games: dice, dominoes, cribbage

Free hand-drawn printable scoresheets, rules of play & puzzles

One-of-a-kind cribbage boards: driftwood, leather, and even a belt

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

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

Add a label to handles and pulls for superior organization

Flexible but sturdy, creative solutions to tricky problem corners

About Our Leather

Walnut Studiolo proudly uses only full grain vegetable-tanned leather, tanned in the USA by a fourth-generation family-owned tannery. 

American Vegetable-Tanned Leather Debossed by Walnut Studiolo

Let's break down what that really means. 

"Leather" at Walnut means only the highest quality, full grain, un-sanded, non-stamped, natural cowhides. (For a wood analogy, it's like using a real wood board instead of particleboard or veneer.) 

"Vegetable-tanned" means the hides are "tanned" (preserved for long life) using naturally-occurring oak bark and plant tannins. Just how pretty much all leather was tanned for millennia until the Industrial Revolution. (Nowadays over 90% of leather is tanned with chromium/mercury - the leather we use is the 10%.) 

"American-made" means that the cow hides, which are a by-product using up the waste created by the beef industry, are from American cows, and the hides are tanned in American tanneries, which follow more stringent EPA environmental laws. (Vanishingly rare these days.)

"Uses" means we take the raw material by the hide and transform it through: cutting and shaping; hand-dying with natural oil dyes (which is like staining wood to allow the woodgrain to shine through, rather than painting it); and treating the edges into all the products you see here on our website. 

Your Walnut Studiolo Product

Since we're using such a natural material, your product may look slightly different from the product pictures. Real, natural leather hide has unique characteristics that individually personalize each product. Each piece of leather is distinctive in its base color, grain, and markings, which may include small scars, mars, or blemishes that are a natural part of the cow's life and a sign of the high quality of the leather we use.

About Bridle Leather

Walnut uses "English-style bridle leather" for a very few of our products, each of which is labeled in the Materials. Bridle leather is vegetable-tanned leather that is dyed at the tannery and infused with extra waxes and oils for more weather resistance. It's important for only a few products, such as our Bicycle Mud Flaps. The tannery dyes create a homogenous surface with a matte finish that matches the color of our hand-dyed veg-tan leather but not the lustrous natural leather grain.  

 

Would you like to learn more about leather?

Sign up for our Free Leather Learning Series. 

Leather Care Recommendations

 

What Does Quality Leather Mean - Infographic

 

More Reading on our Blog:

How We Source Our Leather

Explained: Garment Leather vs Vegetable-Tanned Leather

Why I Use USA-Made, Vegetable-Tanned Leather

Why Handmade Matters

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