The Working Upholsterer’s Bible · Tools
Leather isn’t sold by the metre — it’s sold by the hide, in square feet, and every hide is a different shape with its own scars. This works out how much you really need, and how many hides to buy.
The thing that catches everyone out: a hide is not a roll of cloth. It’s an animal-shaped piece with legs, a neck, a stretchy belly and the odd barbed-wire scar — so you can never use all of it. The trade allows for that with a simple rule: one metre of upholstery fabric equals roughly eighteen square feet of hide. Pick your piece below, or convert a fabric estimate, and this does the rest.
The finish decides the waste. The more natural the leather, the more of each hide you lose to marks the finish would otherwise hide.
Upholstery leather runs about 0.9–1.2 mm thick. Thinner is for garments and will not survive a seat; much thicker will not pull round a curve.
Fabric comes off a roll at a constant width, so a metre is a metre. Leather is sold by the hide (a whole skin) or the half hide, and priced by the square foot — the tannery measures each skin and marks the footage on the back. A full cow hide averages around 50 sq ft, but you will never cut 50 sq ft of usable panels from it. The edges are irregular, the belly is loose and stretchy, the neck is wrinkled, and any scar or brand mark has to be cut around — especially on an aniline finish where nothing is hidden.
That’s where the trade rule comes from: multiply the fabric requirement in metres by 18 to get square feet of hide. A metre of 137 cm fabric is only about 14¾ sq ft laid flat — the rest of the 18 is the waste you cannot avoid when nesting panels into an animal-shaped skin. One small mercy: leather has no pattern repeat, so at least you aren’t adding for pattern matching on top.
Keep the best of the hide for the hardest-working panels. The firm back and butt go on seats, arm tops and anywhere that gets pulled tight; the softer shoulder does inside backs; the belly is for hidden panels, pull strips and piping only — it stretches and never stops.
Cut everything in the same direction. Leather stretches more across the backbone than along it. Mix the directions between panels and the piece will pull and pucker unevenly as it’s used.
Plan the whole hide before the knife touches it. Chalk every panel out on the flesh side, working round the scars, before you cut the first one. With cloth a mistake costs a metre; with leather it can cost the hide.
A full cow hide runs 45–55 square feet, though anything from 40 to 60 sq ft turns up. Suppliers also sell a side (half a hide, split down the backbone) at roughly 20–28 sq ft, and a shoulder at about 12–15 sq ft — a sensible buy for dining seats and small projects. Remember a hide is animal-shaped, not rectangular: the quoted square footage includes narrow legs and irregular edges you can’t cut large panels from, which is why the wastage allowance below matters more with leather than with any cloth.
Cloth comes off a loom at a fixed width, so it’s sold by the linear metre. Leather comes off an animal, so it’s measured flat and sold by the square foot (marked on the back of the hide, often in quarter-foot units). That’s why fabric estimates don’t translate directly: the trade rule is that one linear metre of 140 cm fabric ≈ 18–20 sq ft of leather once you allow for the higher wastage of cutting around scars, brands and the hide’s shape — typically 25–30% wastage on leather against 10–15% on plain cloth. The calculator above applies this conversion and wastage for you.
Say you’re covering a club armchair that would take 6 metres of plain fabric. Six metres × 18 gives 108 sq ft of hide. In a pigmented leather that stands as it is — call it two and a half hides, so you buy three (or two full hides and a half hide, if your merchant sells sides). Switch to a pure aniline and the allowance climbs to around 120 sq ft, because every scar on those hides must be cut around. Deep-button the inside back as well and you’re nearer 150 sq ft. That’s the pattern with leather: the piece doesn’t change, the finish and the style change what you buy. And always buy the lot from one batch — hides are dyed in lots like fabric, and a hide bought later will not quite match.
From the workshop