Here is the satchel that L found at the market for himself. I cleaned it up with some leather cleaner - and I had to resew the strap (hand stitch) - the thread was broken in many, many places. And it took much longer than I ever thought it would! Wow! But, inspired the rest of the leather journals that I worked on today!

Oh, here is the "Grammy" purse that I found for myself! The zipper is broken - but, it worked great to carry the goodies home from the market! I love it! I think it will be my market bag now - and I'll bring it with me every time we go!

So, here are the leather journals I worked on today - I wanted to prep my paper today - but, I ended up stitching all day. Oh well - at least they are almost ready to sew together.

All of the leather is from salvaged leather bags, briefcases and purses from the market. I deconstructed and cleaned them - used various pieces - and put them back together!

This little one was a small purse - the dark brown/purple leather - the spine piece of leather was from a briefcase. The holes are original from the where the purse was sewn together - I used those holes as a guide and punched matching holes in the spine leather.

That is my new leather punch that we purchased at the market yesterday - it is Awesome! I love it! It works great - the handle is beautiful and well worn and fits perfectly in my hand! And, is very, very sharp!

The above leather on the left was the closure piece of a briefcase. I carefully removed a small piece leather on the front - you can see the stitching marks left on the leather.

These are the matching holes I made with my new punch.

I punched the holes above on the left - the leather on the right shows the original holes from the stitching on the purse. I used those holes as a guide and stitched these two pieces together - for the cover and spine piece of the journal.

(You can see my crooked needle from stitching all day today!)

This is the second journal I was working on - I removed this back piece of leather from a purse - it had a back pocket that I wanted to keep as the back of the journal - so, after I deconstructed it - I saved the pocket and restitched it back together with lime green linen thread.

I followed the original stitching...(see above).

All of the binding stitching is hand stitched! (Tired hands tonight!)

Tomorrow I have to tear down the paper and then stitch in the binding to the spine - check out that cool closure from the original purse!