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During our May Outreach Workshops we talked about how it takes 50 years for leather to break down in a landfill! So, to keep old leather jackets and coats from taking up space in our dumps, we cut them down and repurposed them to make covers for notebooks.

Perennial’s teaching artists taught the women at our partner agencies to use cool tools like a “bone folder” to fold paper, and an “awl” to make holes in paper, making it ready for binding.

The women of Magdalene St. Louis quickly mastered a simple book-binding stitch that bound the recycled paper notes to the leather cover.

All participants learned how to sew buttons on their leather cover to create a fastener to keep the notebook closed.

The Afghan Women’s group from Bilingual International Assistant Services did an extra-special job of adorning their notebooks with stitches and beads to make them truly one-of-a-kind.

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