My next leather crafting project will be another film holder. I found this hard plastic canister made to hold film on eBay for only a few bucks. The bottom is stamped "Material Corporation, Patents Pending, Made In Japan." and the top has a cool etched diagram of rain drops, 4 rolls of film and 3 big arrows pointing towards the etched diagrams of film. Perhaps it means that the case is waterproof and also contains rolls of film. There's also a belt clip on the side but I plan to remove it because I don't want to stitch leather around it. This project will have the same look and feel as my other two leather film holders - I need to buy more tooling leather but it should be done in a few days. After the completion of this project I'm planning to make a leather film box that holds 10 rolls of 35mm film.

This 35mm leather film holder was totally inspired by Patrick Ng. I follow Patrick on flickr and last year he posted a photo of a leather case he crafted from sections of leather, rivets, snaps, a clasp and some thread all wrapped around a plastic Rollei dual film container. For me it was love at first sight, I had to have one. I'm sure many of Patrick's followers have offered to pay him to recreate his leather goods for them but I don't think he would - he's such a busy person. I was sure that if I had the right materials I could make one myself - so I set out to find what I needed. I got plenty of tools and supplies from Tandy Leather located here in the Bay Area as well as two sizes of clasps from Ace Hardware - the rest was donated by my mother-in-law who has lot's of leather crafting goodies stashed in her garage. I ordered the Rollei film with container on eBay and I plan to order at least one more. I've also got a roll of Rollei 120mm with container in route and should be here in the next day or so - it too will get wrapped. My mother-in-law gave me valuable tips and plenty of coaching before I got started, and my wife helped out with advise when I had to make decisions about cuts and rivet placement. This project took about 2.5 hours total and to be honest....it wasn't that hard. I plan to make at least two more of different shapes in the coming weeks. I don't own a fancy leather camera bag to hang my new little film holder from but I'll have one soon enough.

Patrick Ng is a connoisseur of fine writing instruments, elegant paper, travelers notebooks, leather goods uniquely hand-crafted by himself, vintage cameras, awesome GTD (getting things done) inspired organizational techniques, Moleskine art, world travel, and so much more.

Check out his flickr photostream at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/moleskineart/
And his website: http://scription.typepad.com/