When life gives you a lemon…

Despite my general dislike of catchy, uplifting phrases, I do like the concept of making lemonade from lemons and find that this applies to almost anything in life.

One of the main reasons that I love making things in general and leatherwork in particular is that I can see the fruits of my labor very quickly, especially in comparison with my “day job” where most research projects are measured in months, years, and even decades. During a good afternoon in my leather shop, I can come away with a nice new object or design that will be useful and enjoyed by someone.

However, like every activity, there are many times when a “quick, routine” job gets really messed up, especially when I’m in a rush. The worst case is when I’m at the final finishing step and dying edges and then slip and get dye on the middle of the nice piece that I had just spent hours working on…

My latest misstep came in making a new design for a women’s purse. This is one of the hardest categories for me, because most things I make have a handmade and “rugged” (cowboy?) look to them. I also really like to use my designs so that I can figure out how well they work and where they can be improved. I have had many people comment to me that my small bike bags that fit behind a saddle would make a nice purse. I’ve actually made one that turned out well (and sold), but I was never thrilled with the way the handles attached and the balance of the bag. I also thought it could be slightly larger to carry more stuff, so I’ve been trying to develop a new design.

Well, the design came together beautifully. I came up with a nice solution to attaching a shoulder strap. I lined the bag to make it a bit nicer inside and to help it keep a form by gluing the pieces together in their correct shape (I make great use of custom wooden forms for most of my work). After about 8 hours of work and when I saw it all glued together, I loved the way it came together, but it started to look a bit “clunky”. I asked my wife for her opinion, and her initial potent silence told me everything I needed to know. Then I even asked a friend (who has one of my other purses) for her opinion, and she told me straight out that it was too fat. Her friend then mentioned that it would be a perfect front handlebar bag…

I love to make bike bags, because I love riding bikes. I am forever trying to devise new ways of attaching bags to bikes to make them stable, safe, simple, and functional. They should look good too! I suddenly realized that the design I had come up with for the strap of the purse could be fairly easily modified to attach the clunky purse to a bike to make a pretty slick bag. I love this design and am now riding with this for a few weeks to see how it works. I’m sure that I’ll have some design tweaks for the next one, but I think this one is a winner! Click here for some other pictures of this new bag.

I then realized that making things by hand not only is relaxing and enriching to life, but it also provides a constant challenge to make lemonade from lemons. It is rare that things go exactly as I planned in my shop, and when I can turn mistakes into nice outcomes, it adds another nice dimension to the work. It also serves as a model for almost everything in life, where very few things turn out just the way you might have expected…