Itallian purse for my brother :)

Here is one project, that I'm quite proud about. I made this purse as a birthday gift to my brother Andrey.

The source for this purse was kindly provided by Eugenio Larosa. It was a very, very high quality picture of De Sphaera manuscript, the famous itallian astrological book, which dates about 1460. Of course, like everyone into reenacting Italy I have studied this manuscript previously, but never did I have a chance to have such a high quality image!! One more treasure for me))))

This is how I used to see this page. The ring-framed purse on the foreground is quite well visiable, but the purse on the guy on the background... Well, it could be anything.

And here is what I saw on the new copy of this page!

And even more!

This is quete enough to make a nice purse! But as it was a birthday present, I wanted to add something special to the purse. Nice tooled design on the purse was an obvious solution. But what do I tool on the purse? In search for a motif I remembered, that just several weeks ago I've been to Feodosia, which in 14-15c. was a real capital of Genoese colonies in Taurica. Good for me, I took several pics in the local museum. One of the pics was a stone-carved blazon of Kafa! What a nice solution, as we are reenacting itallian colonists in Taurica of the last year of might Kafa\Sugdeya\Chembalo (to be true, we're still in search of "legend" of our group).

Here is the result of my work

Details of the blazon

And closer

With opened flap

Inside

Pouchlets

Strip closer

And from the back :)

Well, that would be all. Thanks for reading :)