In Feb 2016 I challenged myself to learn new skills. I am an accountant and auditor by trade and I recently read an article which set out the jobs most likely to be taken by an intelligent Artificial Intelligence Computer (AI) in the next 10 years and in the top 10 jobs is Accountant and Auditor (Great). At the very bottom of the list are all of the jobs which need imagination. Experts don’t know
how to give AI imagination. I have thus embarked on learning everything I can on leather working, more specifically “Bag Making!” The early stages (a weekend course and a book or two later) seem very promising and the sense of achievement! A bit like cooking - take some raw materials, leather and thread, some tools and your imagination and almost anything is possible. This idea for the leather working comes from a long term love of bags. I have owned a hand made leather “Man” bag for about two years and I find myself taking it everywhere. The organised me likes to have everything at hand and a bag (very much like and in great reverence to a ladies hand bag) with wallet, glasses, pens and notebook, phone, headphones, and charging cables (occasionally a hat and gloves) is just what I needed and use everyday. Add to that my wife bought me a hand made leather Iphone and pen case for Christmas 2015. I looked at it and thought that I could make the Iphone case. I wanted a new project and the leather work project was born. Turns out that even the Iphone case is more difficult than I might have thought (hand stitching is tough). I booked myself onto a leather work course with Bill Blaikie at www.bespokeleather.co.uk in Frome, Somerset and on 20th and 21st Feb and came away with pages of notes, lots of new knowledge and my own hand made belt and my own design glasses case. Before the course I designed my glasses case on paper and then made up a model. See below pictures of the model and some “mood board” ideas which I used to come up with my plan. You will then see how this was translated into a finished product that I designed and made on the second day of the course. At the end of the two days I left feeling positive, excited and enthusiastic to extend my new skill. My first thought was to do a second course but then started to price up the tools I would need to work on projects at home for myself and with a bit of judicious ordering (from China and Hong Kong via Ebay and Amazon) I found that I could buy all that I needed to get started for about the same price as a one day course. It seemed to me that I could learn by doing. I learn best that way anyway. So during March I accumulated the tools and started to design some bags and created the patterns for three bags (oddly called 001, 004 & 005: 002 and 003 did exist but never made it past the sketching stage). Finally on Friday 1st April 2016 I went to a leather merchant in Cheddar, Somerset and purchased my first pieces of leather (about 16 sq foot in four random pieces) for £50. That was it! Time to get going!
