Welcome to Full Cow, a podcast about leather and kink where your host, Edge (he/him), shares his 30+ years of experience in the community. To launch our second season we're talking about leather care
Edge talks about his experience caring for his leather and then offers a step by step guide for basic leather care. Then it's the new Ask Edge segment, where Edge answers questions left by listeners
Some useful links:
Ask Edge! Go to https://www.speakpipe.com/LTHREDGE to leave ask a question or leave feedback. Find Edge's other content on Instagram and Twitter. Also visit his archive of educational videos, Tchick-Tchick.
Welcome to Full Cow, a podcast about leather and kink where your host, Edge (he/him), shares his 30+ years of experience in the community. To launch our second season we're talking about leather care
Edge talks about his experience caring for his leather and then offers a step by step guide for basic leather care. Then it's the new Ask Edge segment, where Edge answers questions left by listeners
Some useful links:
Ask Edge! Go to https://www.speakpipe.com/LTHREDGE to leave ask a question or leave feedback. Find Edge's other content on Instagram and Twitter. Also visit his archive of educational videos, Tchick-Tchick.
Let's talk about leather care this podcast contains material intended for a mature audience. Before proceeding, please check your local laws and confirm that you are an adult. Welcome to full cow podcast about leather kink and BDSM. My name is edge My pronouns are he him, and I'm your host. Welcome to the second first episode of the second season. Let me explain. I had recorded an entire episode on a completely different topic, and uploaded it to Buzzsprout and set it all up to publish on the first Friday in April. And almost as soon as I did that, I decided, you know, that episode is not quite ready. There were some things I wanted to change in almost every segment. And I said, that's fine, April 1, I'll get the record the new episode no problem. Well, I didn't realize that I had set the episode to publish on April 1. So if you are fastidious with your podcast subscriptions, there's a very good chance you've heard the mistake episode. And that makes you a very rare person, I will eventually return to that topic once I have a chance to get it just right. But for now, to celebrate the start of my second season here on full cow, we're going to talk about leather care. And this is something that people have asked me about at various points, and we're just going to give you the basics. I'll talk about my own history with leather care and how that has evolved over time before giving you a step by step process. It's really not at all as complicated as you might think. Then I'm going to end with the exciting new segment, ask edge where you are invited to leave me a voicemail, or send me an email asking me any question at all that I would answer on the podcast. We have two voicemail questions for you this time. If you're interested in leaving a voicemail, you go to speak pipe.com/leather Edge lthr EDG E. Or if you want to send an email send one to ask at full Cal dot show. And both of those links are included in every episode show notes. So I really want to invite you to help me make that segment and feature of this podcast successful. So consider sending me a question maybe about leather, maybe about my personal life, maybe about my opinions on just about anything. And I will answer it here. If you think of it, let me know whether or not it's okay for me to use your voice. And if you're leaving a voicemail, let me know what name to use. Beyond that, it is time for us to get started on this beautiful episode, which is a little shorter than usual, but hopefully will provide you some useful information. And let's get started. If you follow me across other social media, you may already realize that I have a fairly significant collection of leather. Part of the reason for that is that well, I've been collecting it for over 30 years. And in that span of time one does tend to accumulate quite a bit of gear. But I want to talk a little bit about how I care for my mother both when I care for it, and the history of how I've cared for it. In terms of when I really don't take care of my mother all that often. And when I say take care of I mean clean and condition. There are generally only three circumstances when I will do that first, if actually something has gotten on leather. I remember once I was leaning against some white wall in a leather shirt, and there was just some transferred ended up with white gunk all over my leather shirt that demanded a cleaning. The second occasion is when I'm going to some sort of special event. So often if I'm preparing for a major leather event, I might take the time to clean and condition all the pieces I'm bringing with me or if I'm going to a leather dinner or a leather cocktail party, I might take that time and invest in cleaning and conditioning my gear. The third time I'll do it is when I noticed it needs it. And I can't provide you any specifics of when that happens. It's just sometimes I pull something out and it feels you know a little dry a little less leathery than I want it to be and I feel like it's time for conditioning Ideally, I would be conditioning my leathers regularly and at different points in my life. I've tried to set up some elaborate leather care routine where I would condition one item every weekend, and then eventually over the course of a year, just rotate, rotate, and everything would get conditioned. The problem is life, there's a life, it happens. There's a lot of it. And it doesn't always allow time for the kind of routine care that I might want to invest in. Now, certainly, many people would suggest I simply get a boy to care for all my leather. That's an option that may happen at some point that is not in my life at the moment. And there's a recognition certainly that it's not free labor. So it's not like I can just have a boy come in and clean all the leather and go home. But I have to have someone that I'm invested in a whole relationship with. And that is something very special. That only happens when it happens. So in the course of a year, I might condition my leather, maybe three or four times, not nearly as often as some people might think. The good news is that leather is so resilient. It really does stand the gaff to use a phrase from Wescoe and part of that is when I wear it, it is absorbing some of the sebum that is the oils on your skin. And that's what leather really means it needs a set of oils because it is skin and conditioning is all about renewing the oils in the leather as well as providing a little bit of waterproofing. So as long as I continue to sort of cycle through my gear and wear everything semi regularly, I feel like things are staying in pretty good shape. Now the good news for you is that if you have a lot of gear or a little, a lot of time or not at all, you don't have to invest heavily in cleaning and conditioning your own gear. In terms of how I condition it, you know when I first bought my first few items of leather, it was the mid to late 1990s Quite a while ago. And at the time I was using Lexol it would come in and an orange little bottle and a brown little bottle and the orange was the cleaner and you would clean the leather. And then the Brown was the conditioner. It was very it looked like creamy milk or wood glue and that kind of wood gluten. You slather that on and then clean it up. I never ever, ever was satisfied with Lexol not from the day I first used it. I felt like the cleaner was really kind of anemic, it would barely foam. And I just felt like it was never giving my leathers a good thorough cleaning. The conditioner was even worse. I don't know if it was the Neatsfoot oil or the lanolin. But something in Lexol left my leathers sticky, and I don't mean hot and sexy sticky. I mean tacky. Tacky is the exact word for it. That's one of the reasons probably that I didn't condition my leathers all that much during the 90s I just did not like the way they felt after I was done with it. Eventually though, I discovered Hubbard's and Hubbard's is a wonderful product pretty much universally loved among King stirs, because it is very effective. And it is also quote unquote, non toxic, which means it's edible. And I used Hubbard's for years. And it was great. I finally had something that worked for conditioning my mother's and by that point I had changed over to saddle soap for cleaning them more details on that in the next segment. That was a great combination. But then, in the early aughts was what I like to call the Great Hubbard's crisis. Was this a great Hubbard's crisis. Not really, that's my term for it. But word got out that Hubbard's was going out of business. Now Hubbard started in Oregon in the 20s as a conditioner for loggers and their logger boots, because it left them waterproof. And that was fantastic. It's a mix of beeswax and pine tar. So that's not surprising. But somewhere in the early millennium, in part because the transition to online retailing, Hubbard's was in trouble, and the Word was they were going out of business. Now I like to pretend in my mind that there was a mass panic among King stirs. That's probably not true. I panicked because I finally found something that could condition my leathers and it was going to disappear. In fact, I still have about half a case of Hubbard's because I panic bought like a bunch of Hubbard's to stockpile, but I knew I needed to find something else because I figured there was going to be a future without Hubbard's. Now, side note, as it turned out, they simply changed owners and continued production and then changed owners again around 2017. They're now based in Colorado things are great. You don't have to worry about running out of Hubbard's. But at the time, that was my fear. So I did a lot of searching on the internet. I mean, not just the first page of Google results, but going on to page five or six searching for a new leather conditioner. And that is how I found OpenOffice. OpenOffice comes from Idaho and it was originally developed by a firefighter to protect his work boots. I love OpenOffice. It has beeswax oils and propodus which, according to Wikipedia is also known as be glue. They sort of produce it. It's a little bit of flour and plant resin with beeswax and it's used for filling up gaps in the hive. It's essentially be spackle, that's what polis is. I don't know exactly what that means. I just know that Obon ofs is now my favorite product for conditioning leather. You know, whereas Lexol left my leather sticky and Hubbards has, you know, it's pine tar. It smells smells like pine tar. It's not a great scent. So Hubbard was great at conditioning but I didn't feel like it left my leathers smelling fantastic. Open offs, I like to say smells like bees. That is of course ridiculous. It doesn't smell like bees, but it is vaguely honey like and in my head. It will always smell like if I had a bouquet of bees under my nose. That is what open OS would smell like. It is a great product. It has good penetration. It does not leave anything sticky. It does leave things slightly oily, but in a way that I do not mind. And that is sort of my journey through leather care. I started off with Lexol horrible, I do not recommend it. I transition to a combination of saddle soap and Hubbard's fantastic. In fact, I recommend it if you need a good basic leather care kit. There you go. But when faced with a future without Hubbards just covered open offs, and I'm so glad I did. So whatever your relationship to cleaning conditioning leather, whether you do it every time you wear it, or if you never do it or if you do it only on special occasions, I hope you find some way of making it special. There are times where I invest that energy into my gear in an almost ritualistic way. It is a kind of bonding sort of moment where I stop and really conditioned my gear, and it's a way of taking care of it, so it can take care of me. I wish I could do it more often. It is fairly exhausting as a process and time consuming. We'll talk about that some more in the next segment. But I'm glad I have the skills to do it and the products to do it. And the inclination to do it when I know that my leather needs it. Or when I know that the occasion demands it. leather care involves two stages cleaning and then conditioning. Let's walk you through that process. You'll need some supplies. First, a small round brush that you might use for shoe care. Second, saddle soap or some other Leather Cleaner. Although I recommend saddle soap. Third, a conditioner you might choose Hubbard's shoe grease or Obon offs are both excellent choices, although you may have your own favorite that you choose to use. And finally, you're going to need some clean towels. Now I actually like to use shop towels, the kind that you get at automotive supply stores. They're essentially rugged paper towels and you'll know them because they're blue. I like them because they're a little more durable and particularly because they are made to absorb more oil and that's a lot of what we're doing in leather care. It's also useful to have a clear flat surface someplace where you can lay out your leather, when I will often do is put down a clean towel on the floor and just work there on the floor. That works pretty nice for me but if you have a large table, you could use that instead. So the first step is to remove any really visible dirt so if you have a jacket on the leathers or mud splatters, you can just moisten a paper towel and wipe some of that off. You want to get as much of the surface dirt off as possible, because the cleaning is really about more getting what's beneath the surface. Once you've done that, then you should wet the brush and rub it in your saddle soap to kind of get a nice foamy texture and then scrub a scrub a scrub brush, brush brush, scrub brush scrub you're going to scrub your list They're little bubbles of the saddle soap are lifting the dirt from just beneath the surface which will allow you to wipe it away. Once you've scrubbed the entire surface of your piece of leather, then take that clean towel or the shop towel and just wipe it down and you'll see that it's gonna look pretty dirty part of that is the leather die transferring, but some of it is certainly some dirt. Now, the thing about saddle soap is it loves to get into the seams of things. And so you're gonna find all these little white lines on your leather by all the seams and all the stitches. One thing you can use to get rid of that is a toothbrush. Otherwise, take a piece of your shop towel and your fingernail and try to dig that out. It's not especially harmful but I don't really want saddle soap residue or my leather anywhere. Now, once you've done that, you might find that the leathers a little wet, that's okay, because what I do is I flip over one side, that's the side I just cleaned. And while it's drying, I saddle soap the other side. That way when I flip it back over, it's ready to be conditioned conditioning involves slathering the surface with the conditioner are of your choice. Now I'm a big fan of open offs. It comes with a sort of ball applicator and I draw a line and down the center of the leather. And then I like to wear latex gloves because open offs is super slippery and very very oily and hard to get off your hands. So I will use that to rub the oil all over the leather. Same thing if I'm using Hubbard's I will put some globs of it on for the leather and then rub it in with my gloved hands, trying to get to every piece every corner, the collar inside the collar around the pockets waist Liban loops, the belt loops everywhere, you want to have complete coverage of that first side that you're working on. Then just walk away. I like to let the conditioner sit for minimum of 15 minutes on whatever item of gear I'm working on. Now I find that depending on the finish of the leather I'm working on. Sometimes the conditioner soaks in immediately. And sometimes it doesn't seem to soak in at all. Essentially, the more oil tanned looking leather I have, it has a sort of matte finish that drinks up conditioner very quickly. But anything with more of a shine to it tends to sort of sit on the surface a little bit more. That's okay, because I know it's penetrating a little bit. After 15 minutes you take your towels and you wipe off all the excess. This is going to be a bit of work and may require a lot of tools to get all of the conditioner off. And even then you might find a little bit leftover. I'm okay with that if it's something like Hubbard's or OpenOffice because I know eventually that will sink into the leather and I feel like it just leaves a nice protective finish on it. Then flip the leather over and repeat the conditioning process. slather it on, walk away for 15 minutes, come back and wipe it up. And that's pretty much all you need to do to care for leather. There are some advanced things you may have to work on. So sometimes I find particularly with snaps and then some of my older pieces there will get a little bit of sort of this green patina around the snap that indicates there's been a little bit of oxidation, I might take a toothbrush and try to clean some of that up. I don't think it's really good for the leather or for the snap. You might also be inspecting your leather while you're doing this looking for any places of damage if there's loose stitching, anything like that. Those will probably need specialized care from a leather tailor. And I sure hope you have one near you because I find it really difficult to find one near me. But you can't really handle other repairs at home because leather tends to be pretty thick and pretty tough. I don't usually Polish any the metal on my leather. I don't think that's necessary. And wreaths. Really all I do. I wipe off the excess dirt. I use saddle soap to clean flip it over saddle soap the other side. Flip it over condition walk away, wipe away excess flip it over condition, walk away, wipe my boy off excess and that's it. I sometimes will leave that piece of leather out of my leather closet for a little bit and then maybe give it one more wipe down with a dry towel one last time before putting it away. And it doesn't require a lot of time. A lot of that time is waiting for conditioner to soak in. It does require a bit of effort, I will say using the brush to use the saddle soap. Depending on the size of your leather piece, it can be really tiring your arms can get tired and rubbing that conditioner deep into the leather. While you're spreading it all over, that can get a little tiring, my arms will get a little tired, the whole process can also be a little bit messy, I usually end up with a little bit of conditioner somewhere on my floor of kind of wipe that up. And no matter how hard I try, my Open Office bottle ends up super greasy. So I tried to wipe that up as well. The entire process can be laborious, because of the physical labor involved of all the wiping all the brushing all the rubbing, it is fairly exhausting. And that's part of the reason why I don't condition my leathers all that often is part of the reason I don't do a lot of pieces at once because my arms get tired. So I would suggest to you to prioritize what you condition and think about the leather that needs the most. Because if you try to do all of your leather ones, depending on how large collection you have, it can be a lot. But I think the big takeaway is that it's not complicated. And I know that a lot of people who watch my media or listen to My Media, are just starting out in leather, and may not have access to this information and may feel that leather care is somehow really complicated or really expensive, or really mysterious. And it's none of those things. It's actually fairly simple. It's laborious, but it's simple. And it's useful to know that skill yourself. When you care for your leather, you're making a physical investment of your energy into it. And in my woowoo self, that means there's a special connection you're building with that item, you're actually investing into it. And I think that pays dividends when you wear it. So whatever your leather care routine, no matter how often you do it, which cleaner you use, or which conditioner you choose, I hope that you enjoy the process because I do find it slightly meditative. You know, it doesn't make a lot of thinking to do labor, which is kind of nice. And in that I kind of like it when I can do it. I will include links in the show notes to some of the products I've talked about in case you want to pursue them. Most of them are widely available on online retailers both at the home sites of their products, but also major online retailers. And that's all it takes. So, as always, I wish you a beautifully blessed leather journey. And as part of that, I wish you beautifully blesses leather care. Welcome to new segment, we are debuting here in season two ask edge where you can submit questions to me about anything at all either by leaving me a voicemail at speakpipe.com/leather Edge lthr EDG E or sending me an email at ask at full cow dot show. And both of those links are available on the podcast website at http colon slash slash full cow dot show. So we have two questions this time. And I am hoping that this will inspire others to submit questions because I think this could be a really fantastic and dynamic segment it is the thing I am most excited about for season two. So before we get started, please consider submitting a question about anything. It doesn't have to be about kink, it can be about my favorite ice cream flavor. It can be about any of my experiences, it can be about anything that you might want to learn about me or learn about leather and kink and BDSM. So once again, that is speakpipe.com/leather edge or ask at full cow dot show. So let's get started with our first question.
Unknown:Hey there edge this is a sport, speaking from San Francisco. And I wanted to ask you how exactly you came to leather or kink. And I asked this because I was someone who came to it a little bit later in life. And something that for me took a long time to get used to was from outside. It seemed like a lot of people talked about kink as though it was an orientation rooted in deep fantasies. You've been having all your life the same way that maybe many of us experience our gayness but for me, I actually didn't really know what to fantasize about or that I had these kinks or fetishes until I encountered a thriving leather culture in San Francisco and I started trying new things. And suddenly all these new fantasies started awakening for me. And so I always ask, I'm always interested in hearing from people, whether they encountered leather and kink in a way kind of similar to their gayness or their sexual orientation, or whether it was something that they came to from more of a social or another roundabout way.
Edge :Be Spore, thank you so much for the question. I think it's a really excellent question. I did sort of have a deeply rooted sense of leather, it goes back as far as I can remember, it is integral to my understanding of my sexuality as much as being gay is, so it is something that is always there. But what I loved about your question is you're pointing out that people move in and out of leather and kink at many points in their life for many reasons. And that's perfectly okay. I love that you came at it through a different path at a different point in your life. I've certainly talked with people who enter into the leather community, really very late in their lives, having discovered something almost accidentally, I have a very dear boy in Los Angeles, who found it by accident after he was already married and playing with someone and discovered that he loved bondage, it's good to know that we can enter at any point because some people who are listening may be very early on in their journeys and feeling like they've missed a lot you have it, you are arriving right on time. I will also say, you know, one of the things I love about having so many young people in my life, you know, a lot of my followers are 25 to 34. That's a lot of what I'm attracting right now is very, very, very young, gay men. And what I find about the next generation is they are so open to notions of fluidity around gender, around sexuality, and around kink. That's not the way it was for my generation. And I, in fact, a lot of my peers struggle with they them pronouns, which I just find really quite surprising. But that notion of fluidity helps us understand that. It's not like you're set in a particular gender or set in a particular sexuality. And so the same is true when it comes to kink. It's not that you are born and therefore, that's what you're going to be for your whole life, you can move into it or out of it. Because we grow, we evolve, we change, and that's beautiful. It's absolutely beautiful. So I really value your question, because your experience was so much different than mine. And because together we can really represent to listeners, that there are any number of ways any number of points in time, where you can enter into leather and kink. And that's pretty fantastic. So let's go on to our next question.
Unknown:Thank you, sir, for this opportunity to ask a question. If you had some advice for yourself, just starting out your leather journey, when you have experiences or thoughts of being overwhelmed by the richness and the depth of the leather culture. What would your self now tell yourself then at that start to that journey? Thank you, sir.
Edge :You know, that's something that I've really had to think about. Because I have such a dim memory of who I was at the beginning of this, I was in my 20s. That was 30 years ago. I don't fully remember. I don't feel it fully. Remember the fear and the confusion and the trepidation. I simply remember what actually happened, right. But I've been giving it some thought. And in part because I love being semi cryptic. You know, if you've listened to some of my other material, I'm quite fascinated with the figure of the, the sage in the woods with who dispenses cryptic wisdom, because I identify with that, the piece of advice I would give to my younger leather self is this. Water seeks its own level. And by that I mean a few things. So part of what we take it to mean as a phrase colloquially is this sense that like finds like birds of a feather flock together. It's the sense that that water seeks out water, like water wants to be with water. And I would want my younger leather self to know that as a way of saying, Hey, you are going to find your community. There are people like you who have your specific fetishes and your specific kinks. And even though you might find yourself a little lost sometimes are confused or you don't know where to turn. You will find them it's almost inevitable that we find each other and I think as a younger leather person, I would have fun On that very comforting. But you know, from a physics kind of standpoint, the the idea that water seeks its own level has to do with water pressure kind of leveling out. So if you have a little bit of water in one container and a lot in the other and you connect them, they will kind of even themselves out in each of their containers. And the reason I would want to give my younger self that interpretation as well, is it's the notion that there will be highs on the leather journey, and there will be lows, but it balances out, I have had some really, I've had a couple of traumatic experiences, I've had a lot of frustrations, I've had a lot of looking and not finding, I've had a lot of wanting to give up. So I've had a lot of lows in leather. But I have had extraordinary crazy amazing highs as well. And we don't ever live only in the highs. But we also don't ever live only in the lows, when we take the bulk of our experience, it kind of evens out. And that would be a message I would want my younger self to have, because there are going to be some rough parts of the journey. And I want him to know that it's not always going to get rough, that it's also going to get better. And even when it gets better, it's gonna get rough again. That's why when I'm having when I'm feeling super connected to my mother, or I'm in an amazing scene, I really tried to take a moment to feel gratitude. Because I know that just like the bad times don't last, the good times don't either. And that's why it's critical for me to really value them. And in the end, water does seek its own level things balance out into something, not they don't cancel each other out, right, but they balance themselves into something that I would like to call contentment. Happiness is a high, but contentment is something steady that I can occupy every day if I'm able to accept the whole of my experiences. And that is the advice I would have for my younger brother self. I want to invite all of you listening to send me questions please this segment cannot survive without your help. The links are available on the show description on the podcasts website. And once again it is speakpipe.com/leather Edge lthr e V G or particularly if you don't want your voice on my podcast, you can send me an email at ask at full cow dot show. Thank you. Thank you and that's it for this episode. Thank you so much for joining me please consider subscribing or you can send feedback to edge at full cow dot show. As always, may your leather journey be blessed