Leather Bag

I have found that, at least when working in small scale, leather is very easy to work with. It is flexible enough to get almost any shape you want, yet stiff enough to hold that shape. It also takes to super glue very well. Anyway, I needed a few vintage leather bags for a scene and did not want to spend any money on them.

To do this, I cut up an old laptop case for the body, and an old belt for the sides. The belt leather is quite a bit thicker and will help the bag to stand on it's own. I then ironed folds in the leather to define the edges of the bag.

Using super glue, I glued the first piece of the belt leather to the bottom of the bag.

I then glued the sides in place...

and glued the sides to the front...

and finally back of the bag. Very simple.

I wanted to add straps to give it a little more character so I cut some thin strips of leather out of the old laptop case.

I took a paper clip and bent it around the rounded edge of a pair of needle nose pliers to make...

tiny metal loops for the straps.

I then glued the rings into the small straps...

and glued them to the front of the bag. I glued the long straps to the backside of the bag and threaded them through the metal loops on the front. Finally, I added a metal button to the front flap.

Using sand paper, I roughed up the leather to make it look well used. And that's it!

Tiny Books!

It turns out that making a tiny book is almost exactly the same as a making a regular size one. The only difference is that when making a real book you want to use acid free everything (ie. paper, ink, glue, fabric etc...) so it will not degrade over time. But I don't need this to last forever, so I am just using whatever I have around.

I started by cutting out a cover out of cardboard, a stack of pages out of newsprint and an endsheet out of 80# paper. The endsheet needs to be sturdier than the rest of the pages because it will be holding the pages to the cover.

I cut the endsheet slightly smaller than the cover then folded it to match.

I then glued the pages into the endsheet starting with the spine and then the front and back pages. I then trimmed the excess on the face, head and foot.

Next, I cut a piece of fabric for the outside cover.

I trimmed the fabric so I could fold it around the cover without too much of it overlapping.

If this where a regular sized book, you would want to use glue for this part, but it's not so.... I used double stick tape to attach the fabric to the cover. You can see the tape is a little bit shiney on the cardboard.

I did use glue to attach the endsheet and pages to the inside of the cover. I did not want the tape to be visible around the seams.

And that's it!

I should mention that this book was made to be seen. It will in the foreground for most of the animation. I made several other books to sit on the shelves in the background. Because the background books are not meant to be seen close up, I did not put nearly as much work into them as I did this one. Most of those books are just a cardboard shell with foam inside to give them volume. And that is a pun.