Behold: a small selection of projects I have finished in the recent past
Writer’s bag
After many months of design, redesign, testing, and, finally, manufacturing, I have at last finished my Writer’s bag. It is filled with features and constructions that took much thought and careful attention to detail—most of which will be lost to the onlooker, but are cherished by me. By this, I am reminded of a stanza from The Builders by Longfellow:
In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the Gods are everywhere.
My notes from when this was merely a work in progress:
Most of my current leatherworking bandwidth is taken up by a personal project to create what I have called my “writer’s bag,” a wide, flat bag meant to accommodate as many books as I care to read at once, alongside pens and notebooks. Notably, there is no provision for laptops or devices of any sort.
Attached above is my rapid design sketching/braindump, from which my project derives. My current iteration of designs barely resembles these initial sketches (and they continue to evolve as I work), but they give a good idea of where I’m going with it.
Much to my roommate’s chagrin, I began work in my dorm room.
As with many of my projects, progress came slowly and then all at once—now I’m only a few steps away from realizing the final product.
There were, admittedly, many small course corrections along the way, but it’s shaping up quite well…
Bone needles
I took an archeology of craft class, and for my final project I chose to make and work with bone needles. I was less interested in remaining faithful to traditional processes (of making the bone needles) or traditional products (out of leather), so much as I wanted to investigate the interaction between needle and leather:
How was the making of bone needles constrained? How did their form affect the product in design, processes used, and functionality? How do modern and traditional practices intersect or disagree?
The work was very labor-intensive—cleaning, drying, cutting, grinding, boring, and polishing.
The needles were—as expected—quite difficult to work with, but nonetheless I wanted to experiment with using them across various materials (vegetable, chrome, and imitation brain tanned leather, as well as polyester, nylon, and sinew threads), and it was ultimately a fun project to stretch my leatherworking brain in new ways
Square
I told my friend that if they didn’t tell me what they wanted, I would make them a square. They didn’t tell me.
My bike
I did not make my bike, but I decorated it to my liking—hence the qualifier my. featuring: magnetic word poetry, rock-paper-scissors hands, coffee-can waterbottle holder, and more.
Food
Unimportant but delicious, delicious creations: a charcuterie board, and the ultimate grilled cheese (gruyére + brie with apples, hot honey, and caramelized onions on sourdough). Many other meals have gone undocumented, but these were too great to keep to myself.
Quinn Cook 