New Pouch Design - With Pictures

As mentioned in my previous post, we spent a good chunk of our time-off for the holidays planning and working on SCA stuff in the basement.

I like the way Avelyn put my work into perspective. I spent a good part of the week discovering many ways not to make leather dyes. After all, it's period to bodge things together and use trial and error to figure out what works and what doesn't...right? :)

Rather than continue to beat my head against that wall, I decided a change my plan of attack and work on something else for a while.

Since I still haven't heard from the museum about my stick purse, I'm going to work off the artwork I have and some of the information in Purses in Pieces to come up with a pouch design that will work. I can adjust the measurements etc. once I know the specifics.

The pictures below show my first attempt at a mock up, using some leather bits I had lying around.

The little flap over the pouch is seen in some of the artwork and one of the two extant examples has them. For example, here's some artwork from the 1500's showing a stick-purse with coloured flaps: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marinus_van_Reymerswale_-_The_Banker_and_His_Wife_-_WGA19323.jpg

It's often round, but I gave it a bit of a different shape, just for fun. The little toggle on the top is what keeps the flap down, and is just made from a piece of leather rolled in on itself and attached to the pouch.

The pouch itself has a slightly wider mouth than the base, which is a pouch shape that was seen in period (according to the drawings in Purses in Pieces).

The idea would be that about four of these pouches would be attached to the central stick, and I would have little pouchlets on the front of each pouch for additional coins.

Once I figure out any fine-tuning, I may do another version with veg tan that's closer to the weight of the goatskin I bought for the project. I can use some modern dyes and mix up some appropriate colours so I can get a sense of what it will look like too.