Leather for floggers and other BDSM gear

Back in February, I talked about making your own floggers. If you want to make floggers and other BDSM gear from leather, you might be wondering how to cut some of the costs, as genuine leather can cost a pretty penny. Even a basic piece of cowhide can easily cost over $100, and even if you are good enough to make two floggers out of it…it’s still a pretty penny. However, there are many ways to cut costs.

1^st, consider using an alternative material. For example, upholstery-class vinyl or pleather can simulate the feeling of real leather very well, and cost only a fraction. In fact, if you don’t care much about color, you can probably find a piece in the scrap pile of your local Jo-Ann store for less than $5 (vs $10-15 for a new piece).

Another alternative is to buy your leather online, or from the scrap-bin of your local leather shop. The former may be difficult, as it’s hard to know from an online photo how the leather feels, but one thing to keep in mind is the leather weight. This is a number range that signifies how much 1 square foot of the leather weighs. Regular floggers are made from leather that weighs 1-2 ounces per square foot (designated as 1-2oz leather), and heavy floggers are from 2-3oz leather. Upholstery vinyl, BTW, also weighs 2-3 Oz per square foot. If you want to cut costs even further, look for pieces of leather that aren’t full. For example, a piece that’s about 10” wide is not very useful to most people, so if you find one for sale, it’s probably going to be very cheap. Since you’re cutting ½” wide tassels, the width of the piece is hardly a problem for you anyway.

Finally, if you want to cut costs even further, your next bet is buying used leather garments at your local thrift store. You can find plenty of leather coats at Goodwill or Value Village for $10-15, and you can cut enough leather strips from such a coat for at least 2 floggers. DO make sure you’re buying a long coat, because you’d want your tassels to be around 16-20” long. The problem with coats is that they use 1-2oz leather, which won’t yield a very heavy flogger. If you want thicker leather, you can try to look for leather suitcases, or even old couches. If you have a branch of Goodwill Outlet nearby, you can probably score a super cheap leather couch, and it should yield a huge amount of leather, for only a few dollars (all that assumes you have a way to actually pickup that couch and get it home).

See you on the rack!