Last week I was invited to a leather work taster workshop at The Edinburgh Remakery that was all about learning basic leather work skills and how to re-purpose old scrap bits of leather. I made this cute little makeup pouch and I wanted to share the tutorial with you.

The Edinburgh Remakery is a re-use and repair store that wants to encourage Edinburgh residents to buy second-hand, upcycle and repair old things so that they can be used again. There is a second-hand furniture store inside, a refurbished computer store, a tool library where customers can borrow tools to do their own DIY projects, and areas where people can bring in their own textiles, furniture or computers and learn how to repair them themselves with the help of experts. It’s an initiative supported by Zero Waste Scotland to make re-use shopping bigger in Scotland and to teach people the skills they need to repair things instead of buying new.

I loved learning some basic leather work skills with them and creating this cute pouch from leather that people would normally just throw away. Here’s how I did it…

First I trimmed a piece of scrap leather into a diamond shape with a pair of scissors. I then folded in the bottom three corners into the middle to create an envelope.

At the point where these three corners now overlap each other in the centre, I had to punch a hole through them all with a leather hole punch so that they could be secured together with a rivet.

To secure the rivet, I placed the long section through the holes from the back, joining the corners together, then placed the lid of the rivet on top. I then placed a silver rivet stamper on top of this and hammered onto the top of it to join both sections of the rivet together. I now had a cute little envelope!

Next it was time to place an eyelet into the top corner of the envelope pouch so that the flap could be tied down. I punched a larger hole this time into this corner using the punch and then placed an eyelet into this hole and hammered it down flat using a rivet stamper again.

This gave me a little hole that I could thread some ribbon through to make the pouch secure. Then, when I got home, I chose some ribbon from my stash and glued some jewels and sequins onto the front of the pouch to make it prettier.

Visiting The Edinburgh Remakery really gave me lots of ideas of how to upcycle things that I would have thrown away or considered unusable. If you have things like an old leather jacket that’s worn or maybe doesn’t fit anymore, attending one of their leather work workshops would teach you the skills you need to repurpose it into something different and useful.

This is a sponsored post with Zero Waste Scotland, but all opinions are my own.

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