DIY: Personalized Leather Keychains

Hi there! Thanks for stopping by xoxojackie, you’ve landed on one of my most popular crafts. I’ve got quite a few other crafts, travel posts, & curly hair tips. Stay awhile, and check them out!

After gifting a number of keychains from this DIY, I realized how great a gift personalized keychains can be. Everybody can use another keychain, and a personalized gift is a nice touch that people really appreciate. As Christmas was approaching, I started looking for another keychain DIY I could make for stocking stuffers.

I was also hunting for a larger keychain to make my finding my keys in my purse easier, so when I came across a few leather keychain DIYs on Pinterest, I was inspired to make a bunch as gifts and a couple for myself.

MATERIALS

tooling leather
ruler
rotary cutter
X-ACTO knife
leather punch
rivet kit
embossing kit
key rings

I played around with a couple different shapes, and ultimately my favorite is the rectangle with a narrow top for a key loop. To make this shape I created a stencil and cut along the stencil with my rotary cutter.

For the angles, I switched to an Exacto knife, and it took me a few cuts to get all of the lines as straight and aligned as possible. It definitely takes some trial and error cutting these pieces, and my OCD lead me to over cut a few.

I then used my leather puncher to punch holes through the two pieces.

Next, I took my metal rivets and put the keychain together. Placing the back piece of the rivet through the hole in the leather, clicking the front piece on, the rivet is ready to be hammered. I then gave it a few taps to secure the rivets. It doesn’t take much pressure, you don’t want to go crazy with hammering, it can misalign if you hammer too hard. Yes, I lost a keychain to this also.

Here’s the fun part. Using my  ¼ inch size letter embossing kit, I had a lot of fun hammering initials and words into the leather. I suggest you test out your hammering on a scrap of leather first. It was pretty hard to find the right pressure to use to fully emboss the leather without hitting too hard and creating a surrounding imprint. Unfortunately, most letters came across with a slight circle around.

All my recipients loved their keychains. Of course, boss was for my mom, and queen for my sister Hil.

These leather keychains were such a fun DIY, can’t wait to recreate in the future.

xoxojackie