03 Apr

When I started making bags out of leather coats three years ago, I never would have guessed that my love of recycling would turn into an obsessive act of making piles.

I feel like I’m working around mini mountains of different sized leather scraps. There are piles of leather jackets, piles of large scraps of leather jackets, medium-sized pieces of leather scraps, small leather scraps, smaller leather scraps, and then so small they probably won’t get used for anything; but I’ll just create a new pile just in case I can… 

It looks like chaos at first, but all of the piles have a purpose, and are organized in my own way. The medium-sized pieces are used for tobacco pouches, wallets, makeup bags, and coin holders. While the small to smallest scraps are used for color accents and design elements. This is all good, except that my studio is a converted (small) storage room, and the piles are becoming a bit, well overbearing. 

So, to ease my ever-increasing pile anxiety, I recently started sewing the different-sized scraps together into bigger pieces. I settle in with a bottle of wine, a few Tom Waits albums, and sew with no intention other than to reduce the mini scrap mounds, well that and it’s really fun. It’s like therapy for the creative hoarder in me. And it also creates something cool. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them. Maybe nothing, as they’re fun to look at, but maybe I’ll make them into bags. Scrap bags. That would play a fitting role in the cycle of recycling that is my creative life.

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