Leather Seat Repair

We recently acquired a very used car that had leather seats.  All of the leather was in very good condition except the driver's seat; worn and with a large tear on the side:

The price for a full repair (including two other panels that were well worn) was $300.  Given the age of the car, we didn't think it was worth spending that kind of money on a cosmetic repair. Our primary interest was in containing the damage, not so much making the seat look new.  We talked over several bad ideas (duct tape, glue, switching driver and passenger seats) before we came up a repair idea that would look OK and keep the tear in check.

We decided to buy a piece of leather of the appropriate color (eBay), cut it to fill in the area behind the tear, and glue the tear down onto the backing piece. So that's what we did.

The trimming and fitting of the leather took longer than I expected and the numerous leather flaps from the compound tear did not want to lay neatly down.  We got it more or less in place and then used paint tape (low adhesion) to apply a small amount of pressure while the glue dried.

Twenty-four hours later, we pulled the tape off and got a good look.

Far from perfect but more or less what we were looking for.  The flap on the far upper right didn't get glued very well so I'm redoing it but everything else seems to be working fine.  We'll see how the special leather flue holds up; I already know from a test on a swatch of the backing leather that it is very flexible when cured. We'll probably need to re-glue it and we may eventually decide to have the panels professionally replaced.  For now, we're calling it "good".