Well, since I don’t usu­ally have much to write about any­way, why don’t I chron­i­cle the mak­ing of my new mes­sen­ger bag?

This is my cur­rent bag. I sewed it with a nee­dle and thread by hand in the sum­mer of 2003. I don’t know how many dozens of hours it took me to make. I used duck cloth from Jo-Ann Fab­rics that ended up being too light (you can almost ball the whole thing up into your hand), there are mas­sive fray­ing prob­lems, it’s not quite big enough, the snaps on the left pocket are vir­tu­ally use­less (half of one is miss­ing), and the shoul­der strap is too long (mean­ing when I ride my bike with it the bag keeps get­ting caught on my ass). It’s served me well for two years, but last year I decided it was time for a new one, which I’m just now beginning.

I took my mom’s sewing machine to Cleve­land with me. I didn’t con­sider this “cheat­ing” because I’d still be doing it man­u­ally, of my own design, and it would be lit­er­ally impos­si­ble to sew by hand the heavy can­vas I intended to use. It’s an ancient Singer Feath­er­weight, basi­cally a col­lec­tors’ item that I’m push­ing to its absolute lim­its with this project.

After fruit­less searches in var­i­ous fab­ric stores for can­vas that I thought would be heavy enough, some­one rec­om­mended I try a marine sup­ply store down­town. I went to Sam­sel Sup­ply near the ship­ping yards and walked away with 12 square feet of 14oz. can­vas for around six bucks. It smells and leaves a black, chalky residue on your fin­gers if you han­dle it enough. I might have to wash it even­tu­ally, but I’d rather not. Maybe I’ll just scrub it with a brush and some cold water.

The archi­tec­ture of bag mak­ing is actu­ally pretty com­plex. It’s a lot like origami and is very try­ing on my sense of spa­tial rea­son­ing. Things that seem like they would be sim­ple aren’t.

Here are the three biggest pieces involved. On the left is the 16″ x 24″ sheet that will become the back and the flap. In the mid­dle is the 40″ x 5″ strip that will become the sides and the bot­tom. On the right is the 16″ x 12″ sheet that will become the front. I plan to sew three pock­ets onto the front that will be cov­ered by the flap, and hope­fully will have more suc­cess with the instal­la­tion of snaps this time around. There will also be a 2″-wide, adjustable cot­ton web­bing strap, once I can find some mate­r­ial for it. Oh and the flap will be strapped down by two leather belts that I have yet to buy.

Here is the first pocket, sewn to the right side of the front.

Here is a close-up of one of the cor­ners of the first pocket. It’s a huge mess. Behind that cleav­age of can­vas are two lay­ers, which means that, when folded together as flat as pos­si­ble for feed­ing into the sewing machine, I’m squeez­ing four lay­ers under­neath the foot clamp, even though I’m only try­ing to sew three together. It does not like that. It’s very dif­fi­cult and I don’t know how I’m going to deal with this prob­lem on the remain­ing pock­ets. It shouldn’t be too much of a prob­lem since the pocket isn’t big enough to hold any­thing very heavy, and a lib­eral appli­ca­tion of Fray Check should pre­vent any fur­ther dete­ri­o­ra­tion. In fact it’s quite a bit smaller than I had intended. One of the remain­ing ones will have to be pretty big.

An impor­tant les­son I’ve learned today is that can­vas (or any fab­ric for that mat­ter) is not 2-dimensional. When you fold it, you sub­tract from some of your care­fully mea­sured and cut lengths (some as small as 1/4″ in my pat­tern). I should have accounted for that.

I’ve been work­ing on it for almost 9 hours today so I’ve had more than enough. Stay tuned! Pho­tos of the process will be uploaded to the bag 2.0 set on my flickr site.