This Alabama Maker crafts leather bags as buttery as biscuits
Becky Stayner in her Biscuit Leather workshop in Homewood, where she and her employees create handbags in six styles as well as other leather goods. (Mark Sandlin/Alabama NewsCenter)
Biscuit Leather Company, Homewood
The Maker: Becky Stayner
Three years ago, Becky Stayner saw a leather handbag, did a bit of bartering and found a new calling.
“My daughter and I were spending a weekend at Smith Lake, and I noticed this beautiful leather bag hanging by a stair,” Stayner says. “I asked the owner where she got it, and she said she’d made it herself. Her father had been a leather worker and taught her the craft.”
A professional food photographer with Cooking Light magazine, Stayner later took a portrait of the woman’s daughter at a high school football game. So they struck a deal – Stayner shot the picture and her friend showed her how to cut and sew leather.
“It was a bucket bag with two handles, very simple to make,” she remembers. “I started practicing in the evenings and on weekends, learning how to work with leather – and the Biscuit Leather Company just grew organically from there. I’d have one of my bags with me when I went out and people would ask, ‘Where’d you get that?’ So I thought, ‘I bet I could charge for this.’”
Biscuit Leather Company is an Alabama Maker with the spirit of a great baker from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.
Combining the aesthetic sensibilities of a good photographer with the hands-on skills of a master craftsperson, Stayner now creates bags, clutches, belts, journal covers and other functional, high-quality leather pieces.
“I use either vegetable tanned leather or dyed leather from Horween in Chicago, the oldest tannery in America,” she says. “The tanned materials have a natural beauty and foundation, and many are honey-colored like a biscuit – which is where the company’s name comes from.”
Stayner and her crew of stitchers cut the leather, and then punch, stitch, rub and wax (with a secret recipe) the bags until they gleam like freshly buttered pastries. Although her line of bags includes six styles (ranging from $300 to $500), her Original Grand Biscuit Bag is still the best seller. Stayner offers them on her website, and at art and craft shows around the state. Or customers can make an appointment to visit her new studio in the Rosedale area of Homewood and personally choose the leather and style of a custom-made bag, which usually takes six to eight weeks to complete.
“I was working out of my home until we had a fire there last spring,” she says. “A friend let me borrow her garage for a while. Then I met Terry Slaughter.” A Birmingham advertising executive who runs the nonprofit Simon Cyrene organization, Slaughter had recently started the New Rosedale Initiative to help revitalize the neighborhood.
“He’d been renovating these small shotgun houses, and was looking for artists to occupy them. So I rented one,” Stayner says. “It’s really cute, kind of like a small seaside cottage. And it gives me extra room to work.”
Stayner is also sharing her sewing and startup skills through the BLC Workshop, a nonprofit corporation she helped form to teach others how to start their own home-based business.
“With the exodus of textile workers to foreign countries, there are fewer men and women who have the proper skills required to sew by hand,” she says. “The Workshop’s mission is to train them in those skills, to provide the education needed to own and operate a piece work business, and provide micro loans for the tools and business licenses they’ll need. I hope to teach more people the craft and I want to do this a long time – because I think age makes people, like leather bags, better.”
The Product: Hand-sewn leather belts, clutches, purses, totes and overnight bags, as well as journal and legal pad covers.
Take Home: Protect your diary or appointment calendar with a leather journal cover ($100).
Biscuit Leather Company, 2764 B.M. Montgomery St., Homewood, AL 35209
www.biscuitleathercompany.com; 205-790-0786
