recycling therapy

Making my colour therapy pouches makes me so happy.! These are the first of this year’s batch. They are all made from recycled leather garments or leather remnants. Each pouch has a different colour on the front and back, and sometimes two or three colours on one side. I use every tiny piece I have. Some of them are small pieces of my favourites–on  the front pouch is the very last piece of the cobalt blue skirt that has been in many pouches beginning with Wendie’s. Using recycled leather is always bittersweet–you can never find more of the perfect piece. Once the skirt or jacket is gone, there is no replacing it. At the back of this picture is a red leather pouch, sewn in diagonals, from an early jacket I bought at the local Salvation Army. It is like butter–and on the back of that pouch is the biker leather–my very first purchase of recycled leather, some biker pants from a thrift store on St. Hubert near my son’s place in Montreal. Ah I reminisce! But that is part of the therapy–reliving the day you bought the leather, thinking of the lovely things it has become, and the people who are enjoying them now. This is the joy of repurposing castoff things–the making and the remembering.