Leather Gloves #1

This morning was my first attempt at glove making/sewing on leather. I will follow their progress with subsequent posts. I am using the basic pattern from glove.org and custom fitting them for hubby.
First up, what I have:

• 1 piece of sueded chamois - this is a very soft/thin piece of leather, I believe this one is goat, it also happens to be light tan
• Leather needle - I need to buy another one, more on that later
• Thread - yeah, we'll talk about that too

What I have found that I need:

• More leather needles - not only because they need to be sharp, but because to saddle stich I need 2 at a time, might buy an awl, don't think I need it for this project though
  
• Leather tape - double sided, doesn't leave any residue
• Synthetic thread - advice I've found is that cotton threads rot out the leather, MakeThemYourself has a great chart for which threads are the easiest to work with, I'll be buying rayon.

This morning I learned quite a bit about sewing with leather:

• The smaller you make your stitches, the more the leather falls apart.
• Pin holes will never disappear - this is the reason for the leather tape (while you are placing the pattern/cutting) and it also means I had better be sure about where I'm placing my stitches, note above.
  
• And that cotton and leather apparently don't play well together. This wasn't apparent while I was stitching, but a little research has told me that in time they cause each other to rot out.

My largest problem when I started sewing this was that the leather started to shred around the stitches when any tension was put on it. It looks like I can solve this by doing 2 things. First, increase the stitch length, I was trying to make the stitching stronger but apparently that's not the way. Second, I was using a blanket stitch, will try saddle stitching instead, that seems to be the recommended way of doing this.

So, off to do some shopping!! I will post pics a little later.