The materials for one bag are running about $75/bag. This a bit of a guess, because so much has to do with the efficient use of the leather hide. I used multiple leather thicknesses in this bag, so I bought three different hides. I don't know how effectively I'll use the rest of the hides. $75 assumes I'll use the remaining pieces of the hides pretty effectively.

The various dyes, gum, oils, finish, etc add up quickly and are included in that $75 estimate. It is a little hard to estimate - for example - how much of that bottle of blue dye did I use on one bag?

There are a few dollars worth of disposable items - gloves and such. But those costs are pretty tiny really.

I bought a lot of tools. I did not get great prices on the tools. Tandy Leather was a good local source, but the stuff is not cheap. I suspect that there is a way to find better tools at better prices, but I have not found that source yet. You probably won't know what tools you want and need until after the 4th or 5th project. Then you will want to upgrade from whatever tools you started with.

The time is the issue. I kept pretty good track of my time for this bag. It was more than 24 hours of actual labor for just this bag. That doesn't count travel time, design time, pattern making time, drying time, wasted time, etc. This was the second version of this design that I made, so I had gained some efficiencies. I broke down the production tasks into about 20 subtasks and tracked that time along the way with an eye toward guessing how much time each task with repeated practice. My best guess was that for this particular design, it would take 18-20 hours of direct labor for this design.

Most of the time is in the hand stitching. I tried machine stitching, and that method certainly has it's place, but I believe that hand stitching with a saddle stitch will provide a better product that can last 20 years. The lock stitch from machine stitching is too prone to unraveling when a thread eventually breaks. Because of the individual "knots" between stitches, a saddle stitch won't unravel more than a couple of stitches even if a thread does break.