Latest stick-purse mock-up (with pictures)

It's the Canada Day long weekend here. Usually we spend this weekend at Trillium War but due to some unforseen circumstances we ended up not going this year. Instead, we stayed home for a stay-cation and I was able to do some leatherworking.

I took my previous design that I'd developed based on the Fries museum purse and took it the next step, adding the pouchlet and draw strings.

As a starting point I used the pouchlet pattern that Mistress Elizabeth provided in her hand out from the Pennsic course she taught last year. The shape doesn't exactly match the picture from the Fries (I think it's more like the other example in Purses in Pieces), but it gave me a good idea of what's involved, since I've never tried doing a pouchlet before.

I think it turned out not bad. I'll need to tweek the shape of the pouchlet a bit. I have an idea of how I can replicate the shape of the pouchlet from the Fries. If that doesn't work, I'll use the pattern from Mistress Elizabeth but may want to make it a bit bigger as right now it wouldn't fit much in it.

Here are the pictures:

Birthday Leatherworking

I booked the day off work yesterday for my birthday. It's a tradition in my family to book the day off and do stuff you enjoy doing (or at least get stuff done that you don't otherwise have time for).

I used the time to pop over to Zeli's and pick up some leatherworking stuff I've been meaning to get, plus look around for materials I need for my fall leatherworking class.

I found some nice brown pigskin that will work well for the class, and picked up some needles that I can give to folks as part of their class package. I also bought  the leather braiding book that Mistress Elizabeth recommended in her stick-purse course, so I can start looking at what to do with the handle. And of course, I bought myself a few "birthday presents" as well.

They had a really neat book of Celtic and Norse patterns that has partial documentation of where the designs were found. (for example, it may say that the pattern was from a bedpost in Gotland, or something like that). Not enough that I could track it down, but better than most where it could be entirely made up by the artist.

I have to admit, I also bought myself some leather. They had some really nice sueded goat skin in a nice brown colour on clearance. It will be really awesome for something. And I bought a few new tools, and a new smaller blade for my swivel knife (for when I'm doing finicky detail work).

I did do a bit more work on my stick-purse as well, cutting out the pieces for another of the mock-up pouches. I figure if I do three, plus the handle it will give me  enough to see how things go together.

Big stick-purse news

I had a very exciting week last week with respect to my stick-purse project. All thanks to THL Catherine, who sent me a link to a merchant in the UK who had done a stick-purse.

In reading his site, it mentioned that his work was based on a find from the Mary Rose...

Now, this is cool in and of itself, but let me recap. Both existing artifacts I knew about, along with every piece of art I've ever found with a visible stick-purse has been tied somehow to what is now the Netherlands (a couple of the paintings were from Germany but were done by Flemish artists that were living in Germany). I had never seen a reference to a stick-purse outside of that region, never mind finding an artifact on the freaking Mary Rose!

For most of last week I was corresponding with Peter in the UK, who made said purse. It turns out he's an illustrator at the Mary Rose museum and was able to get authorization from the museum to send me the information about the item. It isn't identified in any of the Mary Rose books as a stick-purse (it hadn't yet been identified when the relevant book was published), which would explain why I never found any reference to it (not that I would have thought to check the Mary Rose for a Flemish artefact).

I have to admit I was a bit of a Muppet around the house last week, I was so excited about the find.

So we now have three extant purses I can reference (the Mary Rose purse is fragments but there's enough pieces, along with where it was found on the ship, to clearly suggest it was a stick-purse). And, unlike the other two which were right on the cusp of the end of our period with vague dates, the Mary Rose piece can easily and definitively be dated to 1545, well within our period. Hard to argue that an object isn't period when it was found on a ship that sank on a specific date. I had the artwork, but its always nice to have an actual artifact to confirm.

Of course, as with any piece of important research, this actually raises more questions that in solves.

First, the remains of the Mary Rose purse suggest a different construction than the others (for those counting that's three pouches with three different designs). The handle is a bit different, the proportion are very different (the flaps seem to have been placed much higher on the handle) and the remains of the leather pouch flaps are a different shape and attached differently than I would have expected. I'm going to have to take a closer look to compare the designs, and probably do some reconstruction to figure it all out. It isn't entirely surprising that different leatherworkers would make the same object in different ways - these aren't mass-produced modern items after all - but it still presents challenges when trying to reconstruct the pieces.

Second, what the heck is a purse like this doing on the Mary Rose? It was found in the purser's cabin, along with a bunch of coins, scales etc. The purser's role was to handle transactions for the ship but according to the folks at the Mary Rose museum, the equipment found also suggests he may have acted as the crew's money-changer, so that makes sense. Was he of Flemish origins? Did he have some connection to that region of Europe? Or was the purse design used more widely than we previously thought, despite the lack of artistic representation?

What does all of this mean? Well, right now I don't really know.

This will obviously change my documentation significantly, but I'm not sure it needs to affect the actual project. I'm still thinking I like the design of the purse from the Fries for my project since its different from previous pouches I've done. That means I still have to document my choice to make that design, despite the fact that the Fries Museum has such a broad date range assigned to the item, much of which would be considered post-period.

Since the Mary Rose purse doesn't have intact pouches (just the handle and flaps), I can't really say what pouch design they would have used so that won't help me document the Fries item. Materials look to be similar (although there's no way to know if the pouches themselves were leather since they didn't survive).

All in all, a busy week to geek out on leatherworking discoveries.

EUREKA - New stick purse pouch design (with pictures)

It's been a while since I made an progress on my stick-purse project but I think I made a really big step forward last night. I finally had the time to work on the pouch pattern for the version of the stick purse that's at the Fries Museum.

The Museum told me the dimensions of the pouch (10 cm circular base and 20 cm tall), so I made a pattern based on those dimensions. The pattern uses a round base of thicker leather, with the walls of the pouch as a single pieces that wraps around the circle and meets at the back of the pouch. I then extend the walls around the edge of the base piece and sew it to the bottom all the way around so that it gives a clean rounded edge. Then a sewed up the seam at the back.

This was my best guess as to how the pouches were done for the Fries Museum piece. I got the idea from a piece at the Museum of London.

I have to say, it looks bang-on to me. It sits the same way as the stick-purse example, and bulges at the base the same way. I think I've hit the nail on the head with the design.

Next step is to put the draw string on it, and add then to figure out the pouchlets. Then I have to start figuring out the handle.
Here's the picture of the stick-purse from the Fries Museum:

Stick-Purse - Photo courtesy of the Fries Museum in the Netherlands

And here's a picture of my mock-up that I just completed:

Planning my leatherwork class

As I've mentioned a few times, I'm planning an Intro to Leatherworking course for this fall. I'll be giving it following one of our canton meetings, although if it works out well I could probably do it at some local events as well.

The challenge is how to design a course that I can give in about an hour to an hour and a half that will teach people the basics, given that most projects will take longer than that to finish.

The concept is similar to the course I originally took from Tiberius at Practicum several years ago, which is what got me started in leatherworking. I want people taking the class to end up with a useful project, so I was going to use the making of a belt pouch as the vehicle for them to learn the basic skills. That being said, most useful belt pouches will take a new person more than an hour to make, so the trick will be cutting some corners by doing some of the more monotonous work for them in advance, but still walking them through the process so that they know how to do it for themselves later.

My plan, as mentioned here is to use my own design for the pouch. That way I'm not infringing on any copyrights if I share the pattern with people. Here are more pictures of the ones I did for ComicCon.

For the hand out, I'm thinking of doing it step by step, with tips and info for each step included as they go. The annex will include the research I did with links to artwork showing the style of pouch from the period, as well as a list of good resources for period leatherworking as well as local sources for supplies.

Quick outline of the handout would be:

Intro
Basic tools and equipment
Picking your leather
Cutting the pattern
Sewing the pieces together
Embellishments to consider
Annex - Research and other resources

For the class itself, I'll quickly go over the different kinds of leather, the basic tools and materials we'll be using and a bit about belt pouches before we start the project.

I'll probably pre-cut the pieces and punch the holes but I'll bring some scraps and my hole punches so that people can learn the skills without having to spend 20 minutes cutting and punching everything (especially since I won't have enough punches/awls etc. for everyone to use at the same time). I figure about 15 minutes for the intro and showing them the punches.

For the stitching section, it's really just a matter of showing them some basic stuff. I'll probably show them the different materials for sewing the pieces together (waxed linen thread, fake sinew etc.) and then the saddle stitch, and then let them get to work assembling the pouches. I figure giving about 45 minutes for the sewing, during which time I'll wander and answer questions or help people along if they are having trouble.

After 45 minutes has past, I'll stop people and show them some of the things they can do to spruce up their pouches. Some of these are things that would need to be done during construction, others at the end. This would include putting the little closure button on it, putting trim on the belt pouch loop to clean up the lines, adding an applique, tassels, pouchlets etc. I'll show them pictures of examples. I figure this would be about 10 minutes.

After that I'll open the floor to questions for 5-10 minutes (or as long as people want to go).
That brings me in at about an hour and 15 minutes depending on the length of the question period at the end, which is probably as short as I can reasonably get and still have people learn the skills.

Any ideas or comments from my readers on the course? Suggestion on how I can improve the outline before I get to far into it? Is teh timeline reasonable? Does it sound like it might be helpful or interesting?

Picture - ComicCon pouches

For those interested, I thought I'd post a picture of the five pouches done so far for ComicCon before I deliver them to Eluned this weekend.

Hopefully they'll go over well.

ComicCon pouches update

I'm making progress but time is running out. So far I have 5 pouches done or within minutes of being done. Two are blue, two green and one red.

Of course, the problem is that I'm trying to get them to Eluned when I see her this coming weekend since ComicCon is the following weekend and I don't know if I'll see her during the week.

Still, even if I don't get any more done, five is still pretty good given the amount of work that goes into each one. They've turned out pretty nice.

Before I do any more I'm going to have to go down to the basement and cut out more pieces, which takes a bit more time. That may slow things down to the point where I won't get any more completed. Although, if I can get more done by Saturday of ComicCon I suppose I can always drop them off when we go ourselves. They probably don't need all of them first thing in the morning.

I'm also figuring some things out for what I want to do with this pattern when it comes to the class I'm teaching in the fall, but I'll put that in another post (so I don't forget my ideas) later in the week.