So who am I ? My name is Davis Nikolov, I’m in my late twenties – soon to reach that big three O. I love creating – from pictures and video, through maisonary and woodworking to metal and leather. My hobbies include, but are not limited to : fishing, hiking, bike riding, photography and videography. Turned out that from all the gigabytes of photos flowing from my camera mountly there isn’t a single photo of me from the recent months so the picture you see is one of the rare selfies with my Iphone.
In the begining of 2013 my old wallet started to fell apart. It was nice and expencive, but as everything else it had an expiration date. I started to look for a new one but there was aways something that I didn’t like in them. At this time I was a member of knife makers forum where beside blades they were creating those beautiful leather sheats. There were great turorials on stitching. And I decided to try and make a wallet for myself. As I mentioned earlyer – I love creating and did I tell you – I am quite handy.
I watched some videos, read a lot of forum threads and then finaly ordered some leather. I faced many difficulties, mainly with supplies and specific tools which are rarely found in my country, but several days later it was ready. It had some imperfections but I loved it. I used it for more than five years and now it’s retired. Not because it needed to, this thing will probably last my lifetime if I remember to wax it once a year or so. I just downsized to simple card wallet, to make space for knives and multitools to carry. Here are two photos of what I believe is either the first or the second wallet I made, it’s been more than 6 years now and I can’t remember exactly.
Soon after, having some leather left, I was wondering what personalized gift to buy for a really impotant person going away for couple of mounts. Then the first tooled leather keychain was born.
At this point all I made was for me, friends and family. In the summer of 2014 I started work in a design studio, the manager of which told me about Etsy an how I can turn my hobby in something else. I made my first shop and placed couple of listnings. For several mounts there was almost zero trafic and views. I started making diferent categories of products and soon after – boom – a message for a custom request.
Being told by your friends and family that you are good in making things is one thing, but when a customer puts their money where there mouth is …. you just start feel diferently. It kind of loaded more inspiration in me. Not to mention that the craft supplies aren’t cheap and leather, as it seemed to me while it was just a hoby, was priced about the same level as gold. So having someone pay for something was great. Then I desided I should make and list more things for sale.
Things was slowly taking off . It made me feel good and I didn’t rush anithing. I was working at my dayjob, which was also in the crafts and creating thing from raw materials, and did the leatherwork in the evenings or holidays (mainly when the weather was too bad for outdoor activities, like fishing). Several months went by and that special someone returned from their journey. She brought me a knife as a gift. A beautifull folding skiner with bone handle. I loved it but wasn’t really happy with the sheath. That story probably will be whole diferent post of it’s self. So I made it a sheath. The leather wasn’t the most suitable for the task, and I didn’t know yet that diferent parts of the hide have diferent qualities.
It was far from perfect but is turned on a light – I have been a knife … enhusiast for as long as I can remember. And in recent years my collection has started to grow exponentially. So I should make sheaths for my knives and then for other people’s knives and then… Well, since then I’ve got several more pounds of knives and made, withouth exaggerating, more than a thousand sheaths. With that todays post ends. I enjoyed the memories while writing those lines and searching my computer for those photos, hope you enjoyed reading 🙂
Davis
