It’s amazing what you can do with a few bits of junk lying around the workshop. A leatherwork project (shortening a belt) revealed that sewing leather is not as easy as it looks - even when you have made the holes with your awl, you still need to re-open them as you make each stitch, and I didn’t have a sharp awl.
I had a long, sharp needle of about 2 mm, and went in search of a file handle - all of which had file-tang size holes in them, when the little wood lathe caught my eye. I sliced a bit of scrap oak on the bandsaw to make a 1” square blank, and attacked it with chisels:
I turned the end to 13 mm OD, to fit snugly inside a bit of 15 mm copper tube; I annealed the tube and formed the end over so that I had a neat ferrule, and glued it on the handle with some Loctite, pushing the needle into a 1.5 mm hole in the end.
Took about an hour:
