Materials & Fasteners: Leather Basket

For this week’s project, I took a different approach than usual by first scavenging for interesting material at school and at home. Based on what I found, I wanted to use leather to make a sort of stylish basket or storage system for the junk in my bedroom.

My original plan was to fold the piece of leather in half and attach metal rings to either side to keep the structure in place. However, I quickly realized that the metal rings were too heavy to hold the shape of the basket. It was also difficult to manually cut the leather into a sleek design that I had in mind.

Instead, I decided to cut the leather into long strips and create a strap to hold a bucket suspended midair. I used fabric shears to cut the leather strips and a hole punch and hammer to create the holes in the correct positions. I tried to use the rivet to hold the pieces of leather together, but the end of the rivet turned out to be too short to clamp together the thickness of my material. Finally, I decided to use screws and bolts to hold the straps in place.

And here’s the basket with leather straps hanging: