I have been making straps for myself for a while now. It was becoming such a pain in the ass to find the perfect strap that one day i just said fuck it and spent a pretty penny on leather making supplies. Heck i even needed most of the tools i bought :} I have made quite a few that i like quite a lot but i finally made one that, to me, made the whole process worth it. I started with top grain leather and proceeded to distress the living crap out of it by boiling, rubbing, freehand trimming (as opposed to using the nice trimming tool) and carefully hand setting the sewing and buckle holes to enhance the overall hand made feel. At the end this is what i got: In person it has the texture of elephant skin and what looks like cracks are just wrinkles, but it still retains the softness of its former top grain life. The process is a bit wasteful as boiling the end leather renders a lot of it rather unusable, but to me totally worth it. BTW please be distracted by the 225 ring and disregard the incorrect chrono hand on the watch :}