The Society
The Canadian Society for Creative Leathercraft grew out of the Weston Leathercraft Guild of 1947 and ran for seventy-five years, from its founding in Toronto on 8 June 1950 to the vote to dissolve at its last Annual General Meeting, on 10 May 2025. It had twelve branches across Ontario, members at large across Canada and beyond, and a constitution it wrote for itself in 1951.
Once a year the Society met for a weekend it called the Annual, or Annual Meeting: the business meeting and the election of officers, the judging and the awards, demonstrations and workshops, and a members’ banquet. Its own papers call the same weekend the Annual Convention, the Annual Show, the Anniversary or the AGM, and every paper here keeps the name it printed.
This page follows the Society through its own papers, in order: how it started, how it was run, its branches and its annual meetings, its library, and how it ended. The people who made it are under People, and the papers themselves under Documents.
The story
How the Society began and what happened in it, and the accounts it wrote of itself.
The Chronology
How the Society began, and what happened in it, told once, in order.
Read →How the Society started
The five accounts the Society left of its own beginning — the first newsletter of 1951, the short history of c. 1971, Robert Muma’s First Ten Years, the history read in 1981 and the letterhead Executive found in 1992 — with what they agree on and where they differ.
Read →Canadian Leathercraft – No. 1
The newsletter the Society began with, and its own account of how it started: a group of leathercraftsmen met in Toronto in the spring of 1950, and drafted a constitution over the 1950–51 season.
Read →Fifty Years of Leather Art
Written for the 50th anniversary: how seventeen leathercrafters met in Toronto in June 1950 to create standards for a craft that had none in Canada.
Read →Announcements and reports
The notices the Society posted on its own website in its last active years — convention invitations and schedules, meeting reports and workshop announcements, each as it was posted.
Browse →Words the Society used
Associate, Fellow, the Annual, the Weston Trophy, the Point System — what the Society’s own vocabulary meant, each word with the paper that defines it.
Browse →The branches
The twelve branches, and the members who belonged to none of them.
Branch histories
Barrie, Belleville, Hamilton, London, Mississauga, Norland, Peterboro, Petrolia, Tillsonburg, Toronto, Windsor and Woodstock, each in its own words where the paper survives.
Read →Members-at-Large
The members who belonged to no branch — scattered across Canada and beyond — whom the Society kept together all the same.
Read →How it was run
The constitution it governed itself by, what it cost to belong, the firms that supplied it, and the library it lent from.
The Constitution and By-Laws
How the Society governed itself, from the document drafted the winter after its 1950 organizational meeting.
Read →Dues, the Newsletter and the Society's money, 1950–2023
Two dollars a year in 1951 bought you the Society and its newsletter together; forty did the same by the 2020s. The dues notices, the vote of 57 to 3 that doubled the rate in 1984, a seventeen-year gap between them, and the pandemic-era accounts that show what running the Society actually cost.
Read →Suppliers, advertisers and sustaining members
Nine firms, one of them a member’s own trade name, recurring across forty-five years of advertisements — and the Society’s own roll of Sustaining Members: twenty-five firms, named forty-seven times in the twelve years that print a list, from the eleven of September 1951 to the two welcomed in 2017.
Read →The Larmour Library: books, patterns and slides
The lending library of books and patterns the Larmours began, with its list of books and its pattern index, and the Librarian’s 1989 report on the slide collection.
Read →The Annual Meeting, 1950–2025
The Society's own reports of its Annual Meeting — Ryerson in the fifties, the branches afterwards; the business, the awards, the demonstrations, and the instructions a host branch was given.
Read →Honours
The standings the Society conferred on its members, how a member was raised to them, and the trophy its branches competed for.
Fellows and Associates
Every member the Society elected Associate or Fellow, with the year, drawn from the newsletters and its own roll of c. 1985.
Read →Associate and Fellow — how the Society raised a member
The two ranks above ordinary membership — how they were announced, what they asked of a member, who the first sixteen were, and the point system that decided.
Read →The Weston Trophy
Canada’s award for excellence in leathercraft, competed for at the Annual from 1957 to 2021 — the trophy, the point system, and every branch that won it.
Read →