Artisan's Clutch from The Catalog

I haven’t seen any examples of this design having been made up, so I thought I’d show mine. This is one of the first designs I purchased after getting access to the catalog on New Years’ Day (yay!).

I wish I had researched how to dye leather before I did it; my result is very streaky (I used Tandy Leather’s EcoFlow dye, and this was using Proofgrade thick leather plus thick maple plywood). I’ll do better on my next one. (I bought lifetime access to the design).

I have to say that the Glowforge designers are geniuses. The way it goes together is just so clever and the whole thing looks really sharp. I’d love to see a full size cross-body handbag design that looks similar.

Only thing is I had a bit of trouble gluing those finger jointed edges–I kept gluing my fingers to the project with superglue. My husband had to drip acetone on my finger to release me. It was hard to hold all the pieces in at the same time.

So I designed a little jig that I cut out of thick (~1/4') Draftboard to hold all the bits in while gluing. If you put a piece of release paper between the jig and the purse you won’t glue them together:

Here’s the design for the jig in case anybody can use it: