One of my current leather projects is a trio of briefcases with a special leather panel I had a friend laser a design I created on. The leather panel is cut from a retired bag my customer used during his career as lawyer. Now his leather bag will be a part of each of his four sons’ bags that I’m making. I love stuff like this!
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How lovely! 
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VERY well done.
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I love stuff like this, too. What a grand opportunity for you and what meaningful gifts they will be for those four sons.
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What a wonderful idea! I love sentimental things and preserving them in a way that lets them be enjoyed again. Beautiful!
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This is really beautiful in both the quality of work and in spirit. Well done.
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I love everything about this project. Great concept. Thanks for sharing.
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Thanks all! I’ll post the finished bags up as soon as they’re done. The lasered bit will be on the inside so they will be more personal.
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Beautiful, such a great idea!
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That’s so great!!
I love how sentimental so many of us makers are, btw.
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Wow those look fantastic. Beautiful work. 
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I really love this concept. It infuses so much meaning into the bags. I wonder if you would mind telling me what kind of sewing machine you use. I’ve been hand sewing leather for a long time and I’m on the edge of upgrading to a machine. Most days I won’t miss the stitching horse, but I do love the hand sewn products.
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Thank you! Right now I have a Juki LS-321, a cylinder arm machine. It does great on light to medium weight leathers. I use it mainly for my bags and bi-fold wallets. I hand stitch often too though… kinda meditative in a way. 
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aw, these are very nice! well done, man.
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Excellent work! Also very jealous of your Juki. I sometimes have access to a Sailrite LSZ-1 which can do some fairly thick leather, but its not often, and I miss it when its not around.
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Well here is bag one of three of these bags I made with the lasered panel on the inside. Came out sweet, if I may say so.
I plan on using my Glowforge to help with my tooling too. The design on the front here needs to have the initial linework for the art traced out by hand. With the laser I can skip that step and do a light engrave just to give me a line to follow up with my swivel knife and hand tools.
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Beautiful! 
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Oh wow, such artistry! Imagine what you’ll do when you start forging!
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That is a awesome looking bag. It is plume classy looking. 
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First, gorgeous work on that bag!
Unfortunately, I’m not sure that this is true just yet… though I do hope that it will be a viable option once they reintroduce the super low power engraves that we saw (ever so briefly) a couple of months back. Here are a couple of examples of my experiments with the technique you’re describing using a pre-release unit - as you can see, the results were less than ideal using the current settings, but another forum user showed their results with that technique using a different laser cutter. Their results suggest that it should be possible once we get those low power engraves back.
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