Every maker has a chair on their bucket list.
For me, it was the Roorkee — a British Army campaign chair that came into standard officer's use around 1898, right before the Boer War. Officers needed a chair that could break down, travel on a packhorse, and set back up at the next camp. But the real genius of the design is how it holds together: no nails, no glue, no fixed joinery at all. The whole chair is held in place by the tension of the leather straps themselves. When you sit in it, the chair actually gets tighter. That's not a metaphor — it's the engineering.
The pattern is about 125 years old now, and it's quietly influenced more modern furniture than most people realize. Marcel Breuer's Wassily chair, Le Corbusier's Basculant, and a half-dozen Danish modernist designs all trace back to this one British campaign piece. It's one of those rare objects where the original design has outlasted almost every "improvement" made to it since.
I'd been looking at Roorkees for years. Reading about the pattern. Pricing out the materials. Saving the idea for "when I was ready." Earlier this month, I stopped waiting and attended a three-day class with Jason Thigpen at Texas Heritage in Menard, Texas.
It was one of the best decisions I've made as a maker.
Why a class, and why now
I've been working leather for a while. I know my way around a wallet, a belt, a journal cover. But this chair is a different animal.
A wallet holds shape because it's folded against itself. A chair has to hold a grown man's weight across a leather sling for decades without sagging, stretching, or tearing at the stitch lines. Every decision — the leather weight, the stitch spacing, the thread tension, the rivet placement — has to be right the first time, because you're not going to pull a $2,000 chair apart and redo it.
I could have built a Roorkee alone from pattern books and YouTube videos. I probably would have gotten something close. But "close" is the enemy of what I'm building at Rustic Oak Artisan Co. I didn't want to fumble my way to a chair — I wanted to build one properly, the first time, under someone who had already built dozens.
Jason Thigpen is one of those teachers whose students don't just come away with the object they came to make. They come away knowing things about leather they didn't know they needed to know. Three days in his workshop is worth more than a year of figuring it out alone.
Thirty-three hours on one piece
I spent three full eleven-hour days in that workshop.
The first day was mostly setup — pattern layout, leather selection, the thinking work that happens before the blade ever touches a hide. The kind of day that's easy to skip when you're working alone, and the kind of day that makes or breaks everything that comes after.
The second day was cutting, punching, edging, and the start of the stitching. The third day was assembly — riveting, tensioning, the final hardware install, and the last round of burnishing.
The hardest part of the whole build was the hand-stitching under tension. Saddle-stitching a wallet is one thing. Saddle-stitching leather thick enough to hold a seated adult is a different sport entirely. You pull each stitch harder, your hands cramp faster, your needles bend if you're not careful. You have to slow down, breathe through it, and trust that the extra minute per stitch is buying you another decade of use at the other end.
By the end of day three, my hands were sore, my shoulders were tight, and my chair was holding my weight like it had been doing it for twenty years.
What I brought home besides the chair
The obvious thing was the chair itself. Burgundy full-grain leather. Hand-patinated brass hardware I finished myself. Legs turned by a professional woodworker. Every stitch placed by hand.
But the real takeaways were less visible.
How much heavy leatherwork carries back into smaller pieces. Handling 8–9 oz leather at that scale changes your relationship with the lighter 3–4 oz leather I use for wallets. My stitching on the next wallet I built back home was noticeably tighter, more even, more confident. That's what training under someone better than you does.
A new respect for classical patterns. The Roorkee has been around for well over a century because every line of it is solved. Nothing's decorative. Nothing's extra. Every strap, every buckle, every stitch is load-bearing. That kind of engineering only comes from a century of use and refinement. You don't improve it — you learn to build it right.
Time discipline. Thirty-three hours on one object teaches you how to pace yourself. When to push, when to slow down, when to take a break before you start making mistakes. Most of my commissions are eight- or twelve-hour builds. Now I know what twenty-five or thirty-five hours feels like, and which builds are actually worth that time.
And the one I didn't expect: working alongside other craftspeople. Most of my build time at Rustic Oak is solo — just me at the bench, a podcast running, hours at a time. Spending three days around other makers, all of us working the same pattern at different paces, swapping notes and troubleshooting out loud — that was its own kind of training. It reminded me that craft isn't a lonely thing. It's just usually a quiet one.
What this means for Rustic Oak Artisan Co.
I came home with templates and Jason's blessing to build more of these. That means Campaign Chairs are now something Rustic Oak Artisan Co. can offer as a custom commission. Full-grain leather, patinated brass, saddle-stitched by hand. Six to eight week lead time.
More importantly, every wallet, bag, journal, and belt that leaves this workshop from now on has a little of that class in it. Tighter stitching. Better edge work. More patience. The skills you learn on a big piece don't stay on the big piece — they flow down into everything else you build.
If you're a leatherworker on the fence about studying with Jason — go sign up. If you're a customer looking at a Rustic Oak wallet or bag and wondering why it costs what it costs — this is part of the answer.
