Leather Snap Watch Band

In this Instructable I will be showing you how to take a scrap of leather, some snaps, and an old watch face in order to make a brand new classy looking watch!

For this Instructable we will need several items.
1) Leather Band
2) Suede or other thin leather
3) Snaps
4) Snap Tools (To make the holes and attach them)
5) A Watch Face

Not Pictured
1) Super Glue
2) Hammer
3) Sewing Machine

In order to attach the snaps we are going to need to make some holes. For this we have the snap attachment tools.
Make sure your piece of leather is about two to two and a half inches bigger than your wrist. This extra room will allow space for the watch to be mounted and the snaps to be in place.
Grab the hole making tool and make two holes on the outsides of the leather. Make them each about a half an inch in from the outside edge of your leather strip.

For this part of the Instructable you will need to have the snap attaching tool. It's the one that looks like a bullet. Put the decorative side of your snap facing outwards. In my case it was a red snap. Make sure the shaft of your snaps goes all the way through after you but the attaching side on the inside. Using your hammer, the attaching tool, and a base of some kind (the harder the better) attach your snap. When attaching the opposite side keep in mind that the functioning sides must face each other. If you fail to do this your band will not connect.

For this step we will need to measure our watch. Measure the space between where the pins go to keep the normal band in place. This is going to be the width of your suede. Now measure the length of your watch. I used about three times the length of my watch for the suede length. This gives you plenty of room to sew it on later.

Once you have cut out the suede we are going to weave it through the watch pins. I found the easiest way to do this was to wrap the suede around my watch fairly tight and insert the pins after. This makes it much easier than pulling the suede through, as the space to do so is very limited.

After cutting the first one, I noticed too many little fibers coming off the side of my suede strap, so I re-cut and got a much nicer result.

For this part we will be using our sewing machines.

Make the first stitch fairly close to the actual watch itself. Make sure your stitch starts before the suede and ends slightly after. Repeat the same process on the other side, but make sure you leave a little wiggle room. If you make it too tight your stitch will snap when you go to put it around your wrist.

Now we are going to make the final stitch near the bottom of the suede. As with the previous stitches make sure you start slightly before and end slightly after the suede. Leave wiggle room again, it is quite an annoyance when you have to start over completely due to a snapped band.

There are multiple ways you could choose to secure your watch face, I would have proffered to solder mine on but since I could not locate my soldering iron I used Krazy Glue. Make sure to glue each end of the pins so that they don't come loose. If a pin were to fall out all your work would be for nothing.

Now that you have a fancy new watch go out and get a promotion, time how long it takes you to run a mile, look at your watch while someone bores you with a mundane story, do anything you did before but now with a nice watch!


I'd like to thank the tailor at my store for helping with the sewing. Freddy, you rock.