For this Hackathon I wanted to do something that was simple, familiar, and had a high chance at success. My previous Hackathon projects have both had some kind of major complication that either prevented its completion or marred the project in some way resulting in a less than satisfactory ending. I chose leatherworking as that is something that I am very familiar with and already enjoy doing.

This project in particular is a leather protective cover for a very old book printed in 1918. This book belongs to my girlfriend's grandfather and he has had it since he was a child, and though it is in great condition considering it is over 100 years old, it is starting to fall apart at the edges. The solution was to make a cover for the book that not only held it together, but protected the book from further damage. 

Here is my initial setup. I meant to do a little bit of preparation in the form of measuring and designing the book cover, however my busy schedule prevented me from preparing at all and so I started the night by making a paper template that I used to trace and cut the leather.

Here you can see the trace of the main piece of the cover on the side of leather. I made an oversight error on my original design and had to remeasure and recut a second time, hence the rectangular hole directly beneath the current tracing.

Here are all three of the final pieces. The largest piece is made of a thicker leather to provide rigidity and more protection, and the smaller pieces are from thinner leather since they only serve as sleeves to hold the book cover in place. In hindsight I probably could have used the thinner leather for the outside as well, however I have significantly less of the thin leather than the thick kind and I like to use the thin leather for smaller pieces and pockets.

Here I have punched the stitch holes and I am doing some small stitch sections to test if the book will fit in the pocket. I usually just go ahead and stitch it up, however I wanted to make sure it would work before I committed 45 minutes to something that wasn't right. (Spoiler Alert: it fit)

Here I have fully stitched one pocket and am just starting on the other pocket. 

Here is the fully constructed book cover with the book inside. Everything fits well and looks great. I reached this milestone at around 9:00, MUCH earlier than I anticipated. This allowed me to increase my scope to include something that I had not originally planned: laser etching the title of the book onto the cover.

I had never done any kind of laser etching on leather before so this was a brand new and risky attempt, however I had high confidence in success. The book has a rather simple cover with a title and a black illustration of the main character (Billy) and the Major, so I thought it would be a simple thing to turn the image into a bitmat and then a DXF on inkscape, however the image did not translate to digital well due to reflective tape on the cover, difficulty taking a clear picture, and limitations of time and software. Instead I opted to make a simple recreation of the title on Canva and etch that onto the leather. I performed a couple tests on scrap leather to determine the best power level, and then etched the title onto the final project.

Here is a picture of the final project In all of its glory. I am very pleased with the result and am seriously considering adding this to my regular repertoire of leather products.