About - rinarts

Rinarts is a small studio run by Rina, a designer of leather bags and accessories. She has a degree in medicine and worked as a physician for several years; later as a manager she worked in a public health organization.

As long as she can remember, Rina made her own clothes or customised clothes she bought. In later years, besides a busy day job as a manager/physician, she enjoyed to continue this. A few years ago, she started to design and sewed leather purses, clutches, and small bags as presents for friends and family.

She has taken several courses in leather working to improve her skills. A few years ago Rina started selling her products on the internet.

Rina has a passion for designing the different. She is inspired by art, architecture and simplicity in design. She loves to work with different kinds of leather and often combines contrasting colours to make her products more exciting and surprising. The leather bags and accessories she creates are hand carved, unique or made in a very limited series.

All products are made of handpicked samples of European leather and eco-tanned and eco-dyed whenever possible. Rina cares deeply about quality, therefore all her products are made with attention to detail. Recently she started creating accessories made from exotic leather (very limited series).

Atelier

Rinarts’ studio is a small studio, but uses professional tools and machines needed for leather working.
In the workshop you can find several sewing machines: an industrial leather sewing machine, electronic smaller sewing machine and a over locking sewing machine (a serger). Rinarts’ “newest” sewing machine is an 100 year old Singer 29K58, this machine is used for sewing thick saddle leather.
Rinarts doesn’t have a larges stock and because the shop is small, Rinarts mainly creates unique items. Almost all of the products that are made, can be found in the Rinarts shops.

Leather working tools

Apart from the machines, the hand tools are essential for making leather products. Working with leather usually means you are working with hand tools a lot.

Materials

Rina’s studio uses all kinds of leather: cow leather, goat skin, lambskin, hair on hides and exotic skins like ostrich skin and fish leather (salmon, stingray) Beautiful browns and blacks, but also the bright and “trendy”colored skins. Rina uses exotic skins for small accessories and for combining with other leathers in larger products.

Rina loves bright colors, but also fell in love with the natural vegetable tanned leather. This leather darkens beautifully to a light honey over the years.

Rina purchases all her leather from Dutch leather suppliers and all of them are hand picked. She always looks for hand dyed, vegetable tanned skins. These leathers are her favorites. In 2012 she also started to make bags and accessories made from antique grain sacks and post bags and from heavy duty linen, combined with leather.
All hardware she uses are of high quality. Recently she started to use wood in her designs

The leathers

IMG_4160_2 — Vegetable tanned hand dyed cow leather

Linings

Rinarts uses top quality suede or lambskins to line her larger bags. In her clutches she also loves to use italian heavy cotton, in natural or off white, or English quilt fabrics with beautiful prints.

Linen and hemp

Besides the antique linens, Rinarts purchased also some beautiful heavy new linens for her bags and clutches.