I wanted a place for the thoughts around the builds, not just the finished portfolio pages. This is where I write about workflow changes, leather experiments, online presence, commissions, and the weird middle ground between digital planning and hands-on making.
Why It Exists
A lot of the interesting stuff happens between milestones: small process breakthroughs, business experiments, tool changes, and the moments where one discipline unexpectedly improves another. I wanted room for that too.
What To Expect
Some entries are practical. Some are reflective. Most of them are me trying to get clearer about how I work, what I want this site to be, and where the projects are heading next.
Christmas had me rushing to finish a few gifts, which pushed the leatherwork back into focus. That turned into a nice reminder that the overlap between leather and CAD is better than I would have guessed when I started. Fusion 360 has become part of how I build templates and patterns, and the fact that it is parametric means those ideas stay editable instead of turning into one-off dead ends.
That workflow has also made lettering and tooling feel a lot less intimidating. I generate a script, clean it up into an SVG, bring it into Fusion, extrude the negative, and print a stencil. From there I can trace it cleanly onto the leather and concentrate on the hand work instead of fighting the layout. A couple weeks earlier I did not feel remotely confident about tooling. Now I at least feel like I have a repeatable way into it.
I finally started taking my online presence more seriously, which meant making a TikTok and seeing what happened. I still do not scroll on it, thankfully, but posting has been useful. The early numbers were encouraging, and more importantly, it started conversations. No conversions yet at that point, but messages were coming in, which mattered more than vanity metrics.
The more interesting part was pricing. A lot of people liked the work until the conversation reached cost, which is fair. I have been trying to get better at easing people into what custom fabrication actually involves instead of dropping the whole price on them like a brick. It is still a learning curve, but it feels like part of building the workshop into something more real.
When I first put the site together, I knew it needed to be a portfolio. What I was less sure about was whether it should also make room for a blog, or if that was me wandering too far into journal territory. I was trying to take my online identity more seriously at the same time, which made the question feel bigger than it probably was.
I like this entry because it catches that uncertainty in real time. The portfolio part was obvious. The writing part was not. But in hindsight, that uncertainty is exactly why I wanted the blog. The finished projects matter, but so does the process of figuring out what kind of maker, seller, and builder I am trying to be in public.