The Craft
The Society judged, taught and showed leathercraft for seventy-five years. Here are the techniques members wrote up for each other, the guests who came to demonstrate, the competitions and exhibitions that judged the work, and the workshops where members taught one another. The photographs have their own section, the Photo Gallery.
Every page here links to the newsletter issue or the paper it comes from. If you work in leather yourself, start with the techniques; for the Society at its most ambitious, start with the Weston Trophy.
Techniques and Projects
How to make it — moulding, tooling, lacing, dyeing and the rest, drawn from the newsletter’s own how-to and project articles.
Browse →Guests and Demonstrators
Outside visitors the Society invited to demonstrate or present at its conventions and branch meetings, and what they came to show.
Browse →Competitions and exhibitions
How the Society judged its members’ work, and where it showed it: its own trophy and competitions, and the exhibitions and outside competitions its members entered, from 1951.
The Weston Trophy
The branches’ team competition and the Society’s highest honour, judged at almost every Annual the Society held.
Read →The Virtual Annual Competition
The Society’s last five competitions, judged online — every entry photographed, with its maker and its award.
Browse →The International Assembly of Leathercraftsmen, 1954–1970
Sixteen cross-border gatherings, Buffalo to Toronto — the demonstrations, the Salon of Leathercraft the Society proposed (a juried exhibit judged on art standards), the attendance counts, and why there was no seventeenth.
Read →The Canadian Handicrafts Guild competition at the C.N.E., 1951–1989
Forty years at the Exhibition — the prize lists, the record entry of 1957, the fire that cancelled 1961, three severe judges' reports, and the sale that replaced the competition.
Read →The Federation of Leather Guilds shows, 1970 and 1990
A Woodstock delegation to the Midwest Federation's show in 1970, and twenty years on, five members attending, four bringing home sixteen placements — four of them Best of Category — from the International Federation of Leather Guilds' Annual Show at Indianapolis.
Read →M6 — Canadian Master Craftsmen, 1972–73
Twelve pieces by five CSCL members, sketched for the newsletter, shown again at OISE alongside the country's other prize-winning craftsmen — then toured on to Prince Edward Island.
Read →Leather 2013 — Creative Versatility
The Society’s show of contemporary leather art at the Woodstock Art Gallery, with the artist statements and biographies of its ten exhibitors, from the brochure.
Read →Leather '84 — the call for entries
A tentative July date, a Call for Entry, and a judging pushed back for summer holidays — the Society's own announcement of its 1984 biennial show, confirmed and opened at the Scarborough Civic Centre that July.
Read →Workshops and conventions
How members taught one another, and the gatherings where they did it: the history of the Society’s workshops, and the convention and workshop papers that survive, year by year.
The workshops, 1951–2025
Forty years of the Society teaching itself in Hamilton kitchens and church halls, then a 1996 cash prize to fight declining interest, a 2014 convention run as a day of workshops, Mississauga's pewter-casting and Gunna Bag series, a Norland sharpening day with eight members in October 2019, and a clutch-purse workshop at Norland in 2022.
Read →Convention and workshop papers
The programmes, registration forms, competition notices and workshop announcements themselves, and the notices the Society posted on its own website — by year, each with its original PDF.
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