Leather Blank Books with Crochet Pouches

I made two leather journals with crochet pouches as Christmas gifts this year. 

Making the journals probably took less time than making the pouches which each took over 6 hours to crochet.  I have no pattern for the pouches or the journals, I just made it up as I went.  Each journal is 5" x 7" with around 200 pages of blank paper.  The journals are bound with a combination long and link stitch that I just learned.  I actually made the journals twice, totally ripped out everything I'd done, and trimmed all the pages by 1/4" because I didn't like how the pages were showing beyond the edge of the leather covers. But that means I got twice as much practice doing this binding than I would have otherwise!

The first journal is very simple, with white paper and a strap to wrap around it twice.

The second journal has the Norse Web of Wyrd symbol stitched to the front of the journal. My understanding is that the Web of Wyrd or Matrix of Fate contains all of the Rune shapes and therefore represents all the possibilities of past, present, and future. I thought the symbology was appropriate for a journal. The leather piece I used for this journal has a rough edge with a long curve and tail that I attached the strap to and used a longer leather lace to wrap the journal a couple times around.

The Web of Wyrd.

Thanks for reading. 

Aileen 

Leather Blank Books

I'm back to doing book making and this week I made two.

1). A 2' x 2" mini memento book. 

Some leather patchwork and a pretty little key.

An interesting X's binding stitch.

And a few pages printed with mini photos of family members.

2). And a rugged looking  5" x 7" leather blank book suitable for a guy.

A simple and sturdy long stitch binding.

A mix of papers for the pages; white, color, graph, line, and maps.

Thanks for reading.

Aileen

Status Update - Leather Projects

Ok, this is an experiment. Because I apparently find writing a complete blog post painfully restricting and seemingly impossible to complete. I am going to attempt the 'status update' format of Facebook or Google+  for my blog entries. No one reads the long posts anyway, right, if they read anything at all.  It's all about the photos and less than 140 words in today's world. So I am going to write more frequent, but shorter and less 'informative' posts. 

In the last week I've been working with leather. 

I made two miniature leather journals and a medicine bag. 

The leather is all from inexpensive bags of scraps you can buy by the pound. I've never worked in leather before. It's rather tough to sew. You need special needles and thread and tools like a leather punch and a very sharp stanly knife. But it smells sooo good.

I have plans for more journals and bags and possibly jewelry pieces or embellishments.