When he was 11, Brian Hurita found a few yards of canvas and hand-stitched his own French Foreign Legion hat. "It was cool -- with a flap down the back," he remembers. "I'd seen them in movies -- back ...

If you try to sew leather on a standard consumer-grade machine, more often than not you’ll quickly learn its limits. Most machines are built for speed, and trying to get them to punch through heavy ...