It all began with “a cheap, mass-produced pair of spur straps,” said Andrew Boomer of Bluff Dale, Texas, as he began to recount the seemingly accidental way that leatherwork became an ongoing passion. “The straps broke one day. I decided to try my hand at building a pair.”
At the time, he was about 20 years young, dating a girl and attending Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas. “I bought some kind of veg-tan leather and a basketweave tool from a little leather shop in town. I had no idea what I was doing. I made a god-awful pair of spur straps. They were terrible. I had to go and buy a pair,” he admitted.
Maybe it was the rich scent of tanned leather or the novelty of working with his hands. For although his project
