Seppa's coin pouch

Here's the promised post about the belt pouch for coins.

I caved and purchased Tandy Leather's 'Winsor Belt Bag' kit; which comes with naked leather precut and hole-punched pieces, some black waxed thread, a large-eye needle, and a short black leather thong. I discarded the black thread and leather thong, because I didn't want that much black in Seppa's kit.

It does take some tricky counting to correctly make the bag. Also, we came to the conclusion that double-needle sewing method would be quicker and easier. Also, the thong wants to be longer if one wants to have some beads hanging from the thong.

About the size of the bag:

It's not so small that I can't stick my hand in there to fish out coins, of which, I'm glad to say, Seppa now has a few. I sold the one dose of liao that I had, for a loss, but I wanted to have a few coins for player events.

The pouch's tooled flap.

The flap carries several symbolic gestures and marks. The Varushkans have animals to represent the Virtues of the Way; from those animals, one can represent them as 'runes'. The rune on the flap is the Spider, who represents both Vigilance and Wisdom. The seven little tooled marks along the bottom are the Seven Virtues; this isn't how PD or other players represent the Seven Virtues, but I opted to express it this way.

Once Galla dyed the leather, I had a flash of thought, and grabbed her pear-shader tool and randomly bashed the dye-damp leather with the shader to add just a fraction more surface texture to the flap.

The pre-cut and pre-punched pieces, after we'd dyed them with saddle brown.

The saddle brown dye has stiffened the thin leather, but I suspect that once I start using it, that it will soften some.

I appear to be rather fond of this leather stamp.

The leather button for the pouch; it's the first thing stitched, and I had used the heavy waxed black thread to attach it. That's about when I decided I didn't want to use the black thread and switched to my brown thread.

A clever use of stamps to make a tiny eye.

We used 'mahogany' dye for the tooled leather portions of the bag.

The eye of Vigilance.

The image above shows where I diverged from the kit: I used dark brown waxed thread instead of the heavier black waxed thread that came in the kit.  I also used a brown thong instead of the black thong that came with the kit.

Belt loop, flap, and gussets. I put my PID on the belt loop in case the bag goes for a walk.

The next step involved the back of the bag; where we attach the belt loop and the flap at the same time. This is followed by securing the bottom of the belt loop to the back of the bag. After that, I sewed half the gussets to the bag back.

The blue mark is where my player identity number is, which is why it's covered in this picture.

Bag front, and the pleats with the tricky-for-me counting.

We returned to the bag front and here is where that tricky counting takes place; thank you, Galla, for helping me figure that out, because I would have gotten that wrong and it would have looked all wonky, and that would have annoyed me.

Pleated leather, that's new for me.

This is what the inside of the bag front looks like with the pleat. If I were to tweak the pattern, I'd stitch a 'binding' to cover the top of the pleat to protect it from wear.

Next stop, the gussets.

After the pleats to the bag front, I stitched the front and back together and through the gussets, which at first glance looks wrong, but as one has to return the way one came, it does balance out.

Gusset, oh gusset.

I heartily recommend reading through the instructions several times, and scrutinise the illustrations. They really were helpful.

Before I turned the bag right-side out.

It did take a little bit of effort and a dose of patience to get the bag turned; however, brute force is unnecessary.

The bag mouth... almost sounds like a monster, 'bag mouth'.

Here it is with the stitching complete. The bag is still slightly damp from the dyes, but I think that helped with the manipulation required to make the bag.

Side view!

Overall, it went together fairly quick, even with me occasionally having to remove stitches or restart a section.

Thanks, Tandy Leather.

I decided to take a picture of the completed pouch with the kit picture to illustrate how they compared.

Overall, I'm satisfied with the kit.

The combination of soft leather and tooling leather works well. I still want to try the bag body in deerskin or elk (if such should come available). I would also use a slightly thicker tooling leather for the flap, as the carving knife almost went through the flap's leather. I would double-strand my thread as it seemed just a little too thin as a single strand.

I do like how the tooling worked out, thank you, Galla!

Spider.

I'm calling the pouch 99% complete, because I haven't put the beads onto the thong. Otherwise, it is complete and ready to go.