For years I kept two rings in my drawer: they were my parent’s wedding rings. After my father died, my mother had a jeweller adapt my fathers ring so she could wear it next to her own wedding ring. After she passed away, I put the rings away in a drawer, but with the intention to someday rework them into a “commemorative” accessory. A few months ago, I got my inspiration.
Since I already have a Kitten charm, I could just add this Teddy Bear as a new product to my collection of bag charms and keychains. However I wanted the new Teddy Bear to be a bit different, even though the Teddy I made two years ago was already cute.I looked around for inspiration, but could not find a suitable template. That is, until I visited a kitchen tools store and found a cookie cutter (4×4 cm), which
A story about a minor writing error with – literally – major consequences.
Last month I wanted to replace my old circular shaped punches. Since I have a knee-lever-press, I have replaced some of my old punches by modern ones (read more about this press in one of my earlier blog posts). The two punches I wanted to order this time, have a diameter of 32 MM and 35 MM. Sizes I often use for personalised tags for bags and zipper pouches. So I mailed my supplier and asked him to make new ones for me.This ordering by mail I have been doing for years now, and always works perfect. Only this time I am afraid I was already thinking about my coming wintersport holiday, and instead of MM, I wrote CM behind the number.Fortunately my mistake has a happy end: without extra charge my supplier send me a couple of days later the punches I originally had in mind. Great service!
Coming weeks I will think about what to do with the large circular punches. I have noticed I can easily punch the large cirkels by hand ( see photos) so I am thinking of selling
Last week I was busy making these notebooks especially for Christmas. With so many colors and leather types you will always have something original in your pocket! Apart from the colorful series, I make an exotic series too. Avid sketchers will love the beautiful 140 gsm paper. The 9 x 14cm (3.5″x 5.5″) size will mean it is easy to carry around, you will never miss a moment to jot down your thoughts or make a quick
In this 3rd post about Christmas ideas I would like to focus on my cable organizers. The cable organizer is a very popular item in my shop. These cable organizers are great stocking stuffers. They always come in handy and are available in all kinds of shapes, and many color and leather combination. I even make cable organizers from cork (you can read more about this material in an earlier blog about cork)
Last year
In this second post about gift ideas, I like to show some keychains I made this year, especially the keychains with embossed stars. The key fobs are made from thick, yet supple vegetable tanned leather and embossed with stars using a hot foil press. These star keyrings can be monogrammed as extra service.
For star lovers, I specially made a series of keychains with large stars. They can also be attached to your bag
In this first post about gift ideas for Christmas 2017 I start with a very practical Christmas gift: my zipper pouches and zipper wallets
The zipper pouches and wallets are flat and compact. They are easy to carry in a fold-over clutch or a wristlet. Use them as an extra storage for keys, coins, make up, credit card or any other essential you want to take with you on a night out. I made them in all kinds of
ETSY? Never heard of it… That’s what I said to my son’s American friend, whom I met in Pasadena (CA) seven years ago.
In 2010 we visited Pasadena for the 3rd time. Pasadena is a lovely town with an old city centre with typical late 19th century houses, but also with the contemporary shops and many nice restaurants to cater
Spring is in the air and travel plans will soon be made.
I bought a beautiful piece of leather, random printed in pastel tones. Made a few travel journals from it and pained the straps in light blue and pink to combine with the colors in the leather. Perfect colors for this summer of 2017.
Apart from this Pastel series, I also made an exotic series: in crocodile, lizard and snake skin embossed prints.
Avid sketchers
Happy Valentine’s Day !
Just let the hearts speak 🙂
Wish you all a happy 2017 in good health!
This is the last bag I made in 2016 :-). But I will make many new bags in the next year.
So stay tuned!
In this Christmas ideas post I would like to focus on my cable organizers. Cable organizer is a very popular item in my shop and people love to gift these! They always come in handy and are available in all kinds of color- and leather combinations. Cable organizers are great stocking gifts. My heart-shaped cable organizers are even more popular: people love to gift these! I even started to paint and block print them
In this second Christmas blog again a very practical christmas gift: the zipper wallets and zipper pouches QUARTER.
The Quarter wallet is flat and compact. It’s easy to carry it in a fold-over clutch. Use it as an extra storage for keys, coins, iPod nano, credit card or any other essential you want to take with you on a night out. I made them in all kinds of leather, even in wool felt. The zipper wallet
Need an original and fun way to wrap your gifts? These small leather drawstring bags make gift-wrapping fast and fun. Simply place your gift in the bag and tie the end shut. Nothing to throw away after the present has been opened, as the cute drawstring pouch is a present in itself!
It’s perfect for your Christmas gifts, or if you like to DIY, assemble some herbs for an aromatic pouch, or fill it with
In a blog in August 2015, I told you about the tassels I made for a client in the US. You can read all about this order here. Since then my husband has made some “tassel cutters” and tassel making is even more fun than before. Also the proces is now more like team work. I place and replace the cutter on the leather piece and my
A few months ago I posted a blog about gift wrapping my items. (Read about that at the bottom of this page.). But before I wrap small or delicate items in the gift bags or sachets, I wrap them in very thin foam for protection, as you can see in this pic below.
This foam, and other packaging materials, I recycle from packages and parcels I received myself. I have done this for many years. Lately however I frequently
First I tried out making two bears of firm leather without the stuffing, one in brown and one in sea green. Just to see how the models worked out using the punch tools. You can see the result in the very first picture in this blog.
Then I started with a stuffed model. The first sample I made was promising, but the stitching could be better. So on the next try I drew the stitching
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and a great New Year’s Eve with friends or family. The next important day is already coming ahead: Valentines day!
To help you make a choice for a gift for your friend or your family I have a few suggestions from my shop. Of course there are lots of other gifts besides these hearts in my shop 🙂
I hope you managed to do all of your Christmas shopping and are ready to sit back and relax.
I have had some busy and eventful weeks, but was not only busy with sending the last Christmas parcels… Last November I suddenly needed immediate eye surgery to fix a problem with my retina. Fortunately everything went really well. During my last checkup my surgeon was quite satisfied with the result and of course
Again a selection of my items in my shop this week to help you pick and choose beautiful hand crafted items for your loved ones this Christmas. In this post I would like to focus on my cable organizers.
The cable organizer is a very popular item in my shop. These cable organizers are great stocking gifts. They always come in handy and are available in all kinds of color and
In one of my recent blog posts I wrote about the little bags I made for gift-wrapping my handmade items. With Christmas on the way customers need an original and fun way to wrap their gifts too.
These small leather drawstring bags make gift-wrapping fast and fun. Simply place your gift in the bag and tie the end shut.
Nothing to throw away after the present has been opened, as the cute drawstring pouch
It’s time to show you my gift ideas for Christmas 2015.
I’d like to start this year’s gift ideas with my popular leather traveler’s notebooks. Last week I was busy making these notebooks especially for Christmas. With so many colors and leather types you will always have something original in your pocket! Apart from the colorful series, I make an exotic series too. Avid sketchers will love
When I started making my first smaller accessories , the last thing on my mind was packaging. The first items I sold were custom wrapped by me, but without a personal touch. I wanted to give my customers that sense of excitement when you receive a gift and open it. When you buy something on the internet, it is like buying a present for yourself. So I looked for a better and more beautiful solution for
This year I noticed that some of my photos were used by other people and businesses. The first time I came across one of my photos, it was on Alibaba. I immediately knew it was taken from my Etsy shop, because it even included my original description. (See my original in my Etsy shop here )
It made me question the authenticity of a lot of other photos on internet shops. A much more worrying thought was, what
Making tassels is fun to do. It’s a great and creative way to use all of the small pieces of leather that remain after making leather bags. Every tassel can be made differently, not only in color of leather or in size, but also in shape. You also can combine different kinds of leather, as you can see in the first photo of this blog
A few weeks ago, after an afternoon of cutting tassels for a custom order,
A client in the US showed interest in my leather tassel key chains and asked if I could make a small collection in different colors. Because I always prepare for the Christmas rush and I was planning to make more tassels anyway, I replied that I’d loved to do this. So I looked in my stock for some nice colors and started cutting.
After an afternoon of cutting, I had more than twenty pre cut tassels in bright
Christmas In July (CIJ) is an Etsy community driven event that is held every July. This year the event will last from July 1st to July 12th. A worldwide team was established to share ideas, tips and goals for Etsy shops to get actively involved in Christmas in July. During this event many Etsy sellers have special offers.
Especially for this years’ Christmas In July I will be offering a free
Personalizing an item is a wonderful service to offer and is absolutely fun to do! Customers who prefer handmade products are, more than other people, looking for something special, unique. Personalizing a handmade item turns it into the ultimate gift.
I already had a branding tool for branding my name in my products, but I had no single letters for this machine. Therefore a handmade monogrammed item was not
Each year, the Etsy Community celebrates creativity together at the annual Etsy Craft Party. Every year, people from around the world join together in locally organized Etsy Craft Parties. Their sole goal is to create, have fun and inspire each other. This year the celebration is on June 5th and 6th (June 6th in Leiden). The first 30 visitors
Burnishing leather edges is a great way to make a leather project look amazing. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, burnishing is basically polishing the rough edges of (bridle) leather. But before burnishing you have to round the edges with a edge-beveler, I have them in different sizes. Than sand the edges with fine sanding paper., and wet the edges (water with a little saddle soap, or gum tragacanth) before
Every year we visit Paris in the spring. It’s the most beautiful time of the year to visit this city. This year we stayed at Hotel Le A, a small boutique hotel, situated between the Rue Faubourg Saint Honoré and the Champs Elysées. It’s a beautifully designed hotel with a cosy lounge, luxurious rooms, great beds, lush bathroom and an amazingly
A few weeks ago I said goodbye to my 100-year-old Singer sewing machine (a manually driven 29K58). In one of my blogs last year I told you about my new shoemaker’s sewing machine. The old Singer had to make room for my new one.
Fortunately I came across a foundation that rescues tools and machines for projects in third world countries. Through these projects people
I make beautiful items from them such as cable organizers and key-rings. Besides those, I use the smallest of the hearts as little gifts or as a tag on a clutch. Invariably I receive very enthusiastic feedback from clients when their parcel is wrapped with a little heart as decoration, or when their clutch has a heart-shaped tag with their initials stamped in it.
It made me think: why not sell these heart for DIY projects? At this moment I am working on creating enough stock for my shop so I can sell them. Want to know how this project continues? Be sure to check back regularly!
The warm winter made these crocuses in our front yard bloom early this year.
Aren’t they cute?
It’s not the first time I get requests from magazines, last year I got a similar request from an English magazine. Unfortunately that time my items didn’t make the edit, of course I wondered whether this time Für Sie would publish my photo. And they did! Below the Für Sie page on which my notebook is featured (bottom-left) and a detail.
For more pictures and other notebooks have a peek in my shop here
Fast forward to the moment I bought myself a lush woolen dress in a beautiful beige-brown color with a grey melange. Gracefully combined with right color pants and ankle boots and completed with a red-brown wooden brooch and my red spectacles, I had a superb combination. But alas, none of my bags had the right color to make my outfit shine. A quick search through my stock, and there it was: a small piece of leather, a remnant of a BIG tote I made last year for my daughter. Combined with a piece red leather this would be my new bag!
The bag has a red drop-in pocket inside and a zipper pocket in front for easy phone access. As you can see, I could not resist to add some extra red details.
My sister-in-law was quick to spot the new addition to my collection. She immediately fell in love and asked me to make something similar for her friend. So I did :-). Because I like to make every bag slightly unique, the new bag is a little bit less square and made in taupe and red. It’s also fitted with a red zipper.
In the winter, when the sun appears lower in the sky, falling ice crystals turn the atmosphere into a giant lens causing arcs and halos to appear around the Sun.
When viewed from within the ski lift, the sun was a bit more cloud covered by the icy clouds lower in the valley and this caused a second halo to be visible! To get an impression of that second halo, here’s a great example, as shot by Sarah from sarahontheroad.com , as we didn’t dare to draw our iPhones when in the lift!
I pre-cut the body of the totes, to make it easier for them to complete the tote in one day. It was surprising, even for me, that the same piece of leather (in size) can yield a completely different result. Just by making a different type of bottom or through different placing of the straps. It was great fun to see how they learned from each other and had eye for detail when finishing their bags. To add a personal touch they each stamped their name in their bag. After an inspiring workshop, my “students” treated me to dinner in a very nice restaurant not far from my home!
And for me? For me it was a relaxing day that prompted a lot of new ideas. To be repeated for sure!
Dear customers,
I hope you managed to do all of your Christmas shopping and I hope you are all set for your Christmas dinner!
There’s no white Christmas in Holland this year, so let me entertain you with some beautiful snowy photos from previous years
These pictures are all taken in Leiden, a historic town I live close to.
We hope that your Rinarts shopping experience was great and hope to meet you again next year!
Let me conclude by wishing you all Happy Holidays and a fantastic 2015! May you and your loved ones remain happy and in good health.
After years of cutting, shaving and grinding, I have finally gone and ordered a customized heart-shaped punch tool for my heart-shaped cable organizers.When the large heart was finished I was so excited about the beautiful punch tool shape, I immediately ordered two more sizes! For this I designed a series of hearts in three different sizes, a large one for my cable organizers, a medium-sized for the key chains and the smallest one for decorations and to be used as a name tag.
It is a joy to make the cable organizers now, the punch-tool ensures clean-cut hearts and after burnishing the edges to make them smooth, they truly have a professional quality and beauty.
At this moment I am exploring the other possible applications for my leather hearts. The facilitated making process enables me to be more creative with my hearts. I can easily use them as a decoration for purses, cardholders and bags. And remember Paula the bookbinder I befriended a few months ago? She can monogram the hearts to personalize them! I will tell you about the ongoing results of our collaboration in one of my next blogs posts.
I am planning to make these hearts available for your DIY projects, so join me next time when I will introduce some DIY ideas with my hearts!
Coming weeks my stock will be supplemented by new gift items. You can subscribe my blog to stay up to date.
My Lookbook is now linked to my Pinterest account, thus ensuring you will always see my latest creations :-). For the “Handmade Bags” page we combined the “Leather Bags” and “Linen Bags” pages and updated the images. We did the same for the “Accessories” and “Tech Accessories” pages.
We have lots of plans for the future, like a review page and better integration of my shops. For now: enjoy the new images!
Nothing to throw away after the present has been opened, as the cute drawstring pouch is a present in itself! It’s perfect for your Christmas gifts, or if you like to DIY, assemble some herbs for an aromatic pouch, or fill it with little soaps for that mini wellness touch.
The pouches made from perforated suede feels like velvet. It is possible to personalize them because it is easy to sew a name tag using the little holes.
My leather drawstring bags ensure a stunning presentation for your gift every time! Below is a selection of the drawstring bags I have made recently. These drawstring bags are soon available in my shop
Coming weeks I will present many Christmas gift ideas in every price category to help you pick and choose beautiful hand crafted items for your loved ones. In this post I would like to focus on my cable organizers
The cable organizer is a very popular item in my shop and people love to gift these! They always come in handy and are available in all kinds of color- and leather combinations.
Recently I received some requests for eco-friendly and vegan items, so I made a few cable organizers from cork (you can read more about this material in an earlier blog about cork) You can find more cable organizers in my Etsy shop
This part of the Netherlands is known as the “Randstad” and it’s actually the most crowded part of the Netherlands! Still you can find very picturesque villages and beautiful quiet places where you can walk and bike surrounded by nature.
We start our tour in Leiden and cycled to the Horsten, the estate where our King William and Queen Maxima have lived with their 3 daughters for many years. We took a short walk and had tea at the Teahouse. I will definitely come back here soon for a longer walk.
From the Horsten we cycled along the “Estate Route”, a gorgeous route that makes you feel like you have been transported back to the 19th century! We even came across a sheep herder with his herd.
We continued to Meijendel, a gorgeous haven of green, hidden in the dunes between Wassenaar and The Haque.
Our tour came to conclusion at the beach of Scheveningen, where we took a well deserved rest and bathed in the sun for hours to come. I’m sure a few more days of this will make me forget all about August 😉
