I'm Janey.
And for 12 years, I've been making leather bags by hand in a small workshop behind my house. No factory. No machines. No employees. Just me, my workbench, and leather I picked myself from a small tannery outside Florence.
It started the way most things do — by accident.
I was 36 and going through the worst year of my life. My marriage was falling apart. My kids were getting older and didn't need me the way they used to. I'd look in the mirror and not recognize the woman staring back. I wasn't depressed exactly. I was just... invisible. To everyone, including myself.
One afternoon I wandered into a leather workshop during a trip to Italy. I wasn't shopping. I was killing time so I didn't have to go back to the hotel room and sit with my own thoughts. The man who owned it — Giuseppe, 74 years old, hands like sandpaper — he handed me a piece of raw leather and told me to feel it. Really feel it.
I don't know what happened in that moment, but something woke up.
I stayed for three hours. He showed me how to cut, how to stitch, how to burnish an edge until it's smooth as glass. I went back the next day. And the next. By the end of that trip I'd made my first bag. It was ugly. The stitching was crooked. But I made it with my hands and so it meant something.
That was fifteen years ago. I've made thousands of bags since then. Each one still carries a piece of that awakening.
With love and tired hands,
— Janey
