Greetings from the suburbs of Chicago!

Well I've been here for a year now (well, technically tomorrow marks one year, whatever haha) so I figured I should probably stop forgetting to make a post to say hi! I bought my first side of leather February of last year because I wanted to make some fancy candle wraps for some concrete vessel candles I was making as a thank you for people who I had gotten help from for an album I was working on for my band (which is just me). In the process of trying to figure that out I watched SO MANY videos, man it was just so much but then I got the idea to try to find stuff to make that I could give as little thank you gifts for people who would come record at my home-based studio (also an audio engineer) so I made some coaster sets and thought ok cool that's pretty fun. Then I decided that the mostly western style of leathercraft that's found on YouTube just really isn't my style at all and there weren't very many channels on there that were explaining anything that I found interesting, and since I've always been a big fan of paying for education to bypass a lot of trial and error and develop good practices from the start I did some searching around and ended up here! I went to school for audio engineering in 2007 and then for the last 3-4 years I've been part of a couple paid audio engineering education courses online that taught me way more than school and doing stuff on my own did, so I figured this would be the same and yeah it definitely has been. I haven't really posted anything in public about any of this because I wanted to wait until I had gotten a decent enough grasp on stuff and if I decide to sell anything I don't want to be showing people anything less than what I would consider ready to sell so basically only my family and a few friends know that I've been working at this for the last year. I'll make a separate post with pictures of the stuff I've done because it might get kinda long and I don't know if anyone is really THAT interested, so yeah here I am officially! I've done a LOT of DIY things, my dad was an electrical engineer and helped me replace pickups in my guitar after I got my first electric over 25 years ago, and he was always building and fixing things around the house so I guess I just grew up with that mindset. I got really into making guitar effect pedals from scratch, I've put together numerous audio diy kits for mic preamps and compressors and eqs and whatever, wired my own patchbays, make all of my cables, etc. I built the desk for my studio using some modified plans I found so I've done some random woodworking projects. I taught myself how to screen print because I wanted to make merch for my band and then ended up working for a few different places doing screen printing, printing on everything from wooden kid's toys to boutique fashion to being the head of the screen printing department at the last place I was at which was mostly commercial stuff. I was briefly in training to be an electrician in one of the unions here in Chicago until I found out that construction just really isn't for me so I've done a lot of things here and there in a lot of fields that all kind of have a transfer of skills and all of those things have taught me to try to be as precise as I can and just pay attention to what I'm doing and get the best result from the start so I think it made the transition to leather easier once I kinda got a handle on what I was doing.