Leather jacket restoration experiment

Attempting restoration for worn jacket or to buy a new one? Or both? Leather jacket is a timeless classic to wear! It can be a long lasting investment when maintained and many people think the traces of usage are part of the charm.

Sewing sleeves

I’ve worn my trusty lamb jacket for over a decade and it’s a wonder it isn’t in a worse shape. The sleeves were worn in the ends pretty bad but I felt like I could live with the elastics around the stomach being left as they are. So I decided to attempt fixing the sleeve ends first before putting too much effort to anything else. I looked up ways people sew broken sleeves online and tried this method:

Video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WguBznfjwpo

I’m not a textile crafts expert but I think they ended up decent enough to proceed with restoring the leather itself.

I wanted to dye the leather a bit but wasn’t sure how the result would work out with coloring meant for suede I had in the closet. Tried it anyways – and the leather got stiff. I felt unmotivated to do anything about the jacket for a week. But I’m glad I did eventually get the Leather wax from the store. I think it saved the whole project!

Waxing the leather

This beeswax is a finnish product that contains also woolwax from “Mesimestari”. It didn’t have a strong fragnance and can be applied on leather with fingers if you haven’t got anything else on hand. Still, it’s best to rub wax in with a cloth so that there won’t be too much leftover product on the surface. I have sensitive skin and I worked the wax to the leather without gloves on and it didn’t irritate my skin. I’m really pleased with the product! Will be buying again.

The waxing made leather soft again, most of the black color sticked and the shine for the leather is back. The wax didn’t tilt the color – just refreshed the existing color. I think the jacket restoration worked well enough that I’ll be wearing it this summer. From now on I’ll be sure to wax my jacket more often than once in a decade!