So about a week or so ago, I was casually scrolling through Taobao and thought, “Hey, why not give this a shot?” I’ve been toying with the idea of picking up leatherworking as a hobby, so I figured I’d order some tools and faux leather to see what the quality was like. Harmless enough, right?
Well… not exactly.
As you might guess, navigating a site that’s half in Chinese didn’t exactly make things easy—especially when it came to understanding the sizing of the materials. The product title said “138cm,” so naturally, I assumed each piece of faux leather I ordered was a nice, neat 138cm square.
Oh, boy was i wrong.
Turns out, the 138cm was just the width. The length? A casual, totally reasonable 36 METERS. And because I ordered three different colours for practice, I am now the proud soon-to-be owner of 108 meters of faux leather.
So yeah. My house is about to become a faux leather warehouse. Anyone need a couch reupholstered?
TL;DR:
Tried to buy a few practice sheets of faux leather from Taobao for a new leatherworking hobby. Misread the sizing due to translation issues and accidentally ordered 108 meters of it. Oops
Comments
Introduce yourself to /r/leathercraft.
Ordered 108m of faux leather, whoops? Been there, made an entire wardrobe for our dog… twice.
354 feet. That is a lot.
How much did that cost ya?
Well, it could be worse. They could have been swatches of leather for ants.
I would think that would flag either in cost or shipping…
Now I’m curious about what your pricing expectations were and what the material quality will be.
Did you think it would cost significantly more?
Or is the material essentially unusable?
Must’ve been really cheap for you to not even notice. Honestly this almost sounds like an ad for a site I’ve never heard of.
Can you try making baseball gloves with that for fun of it?