So an update on my new little hobby: leathercrafting. Making watch straps, as I’ve discovered is not as easy as it looks. There are tight tolerances and a few millimetres off here or there makes for an unco-looking strap! Slowly but surely I am making progress.
My biggest challenge so far has been my choice of leather. I bought a piece of black chromexcel offcut from eBay and I thought “sweet!”. But it turned out to be too thick for watch straps.
Ask me a year ago (hell, a season ago) and I would have said that you don’t really need black shoes. Ok, maybe one pair for weddings/funerals/job interviews that you dust off occasionally, but the rest of the time you can wear brown. Black is just too stuffy and formal. Brown shows that you are more casual, cooler, more stylish.
But lately I’ve been coming back around. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been looking at too many Japanese denim blogs and Insta accounts or my current obsession with Pacific Northwest bootmakers lately (more on that later) or just too many guys wear brown derbies these days. It’s not that my opinion has changed about sleek, formal looking black dress shoes – I still think black oxfords are still too formal for my day-to-day wear. It’s the casual black footwear that’s got my attention lately. Continue reading “Rethinking Black Shoes”
