Making a leather pocket, part I

About a year ago, I discussed a leather drawstring pocket found at Elephantine, Egypt, and compared it to a readymade bag from Crazy Crow that I thought would make a passable substitute.  I felt at the time that it wouldn't be difficult to make a more authentic replica, and since I have a few spare days, it seemed like now was the moment to go ahead with that.

Based on the dimensions of the Crazy Crow bag, a replica should be a hair larger to accommodate things that you wouldn't want to leave unattended, including a phone, passport, wallet and spare cash.  I turned the readymade bag inside-out and measured its full height at 6.25 inches (17.22cm) and width at 4.75 inches (12.06cm), and increased them to 7 and 5 inches (17.78 and 12.7cm).  Admittedly, this effort is a little undone by the fact that I'm leaving a wider seam of almost 1/4 inch (0.63cm) due to my leather being so thin.  By my calculations, a bag with a 5-inch bottom panel should have a circumference (and thus length of the walls) of 15.71 inches (39.9cm); however, it might've been a good idea to leave about an inch extra to account for all the seams.  We'll see what happens.

The material is chamois from Ace Hardware.  Although named after a wild goat from Europe, American chamois is made from sheepskin, double-sueded and tanned with fish oil in the same manner as true buff (cowhide) and German buckskin.  As noted before, this process is an approximate substitute for the classic braintanning and similar fat-cured leathers of antiquity, differing only in the fact that leathers tanned with fish oil require no smoking, and thus are paler and smell different.

Normally I would suggest feeling all the pieces of chamois and selecting the heaviest one.  However, Ace has now begun to package their chamois in plastic bags, so it was no longer possible to confidently make a selection by touch.  To make the most of the material I got, I laid out the lines around the middle, where the hide is thickest.  It seems to me just barely thick enough for this purpose.  The leftovers can be used for facing small knife sheaths, adding sand gussets to chukkas, and other light-duty uses.

The only compass I currently have isn't sized to hold a normal writing pen, so I just scraped the pencil lightly against the suede and then tried to re-draw it freeform.  As usual, the lines are drawn on the rougher side, though it bears mentioning that the difference in texture between the two sides of a double-sueded fat-cured leather is, in my experience, much less than that between the two sides of most chrome-tanned splits (which tend to have a nice suede side and an ugly, stringy one).

 

Also as usual, stitching is done inside-out, with the rougher side and its ink lines turned inward when done.  Chamois is thin enough to push the needle through without pre-piercing holes.  The original bag had a rand on only one side seam.  I started with the simpler seam, stitching with buttonweight linen thread (not multi-ply cord this time) and re-waxing as I went with a blob of Victory Brown wax that I have on hand - it's softer than beeswax, so it's easier to use for this purpose.  The original pocket apparently had a single running stitch, so I knotted the thread at both ends of the seams.

The next step, sewing the bottom seam while inserting the rand on a curve, will probably be the most difficult.  I'll work on it today and probably tomorrow as well.