Banded Gusset Bag — Ra's Workshop

I’ve been meaning to try this gusset style for a while, and I finally got a chance to do so.

Materials

The light hatch leather is embossed kangaroo. It is lined with chevre sully. The gusset leather is zermatt reinforced with brio. One of the pockets uses linen fabric to keep the bulk down. The zip is YKK excella.

Pattern

The body pattern for this was a tapered rectangle with darts at the bottom corners to create a pillow effect. The darts turned out a little sharper than I’d hoped, so patterning this section needs refining. The dart base also had less material for the band to grasp, which was made obvious a little later when it came to edge finishing.

The band was sized by measuring from the stitch line rather than the edge. The gusset that would attach to the band was sized a few mm longer than the band to account for the leather thickness going around a curve.

When zips open at the top of a bag I dislike how they don’t allow for the full opening of the bag to be used, so I kept my zip longer and decided to tuck away the extra length in the interior of the bag.

Assembly

Parts of the bag:

2 body outer (front, back)
2 body liner (front, back)
2 bands (outer, liner)
2 gussets (outer, liner)
Interior pocket border
Interior pocket (outer, liner)

I started with prepping the zip and gluing it to the liner.

Next I made the pockets on the liner. I had initially decided to make one of the interior pockets with a zip, but decided to leave the zip out and just have a normal opening for that pocket. The actual pocket itself was made from linen and stitched on.

Next I skived the dart edges where they would overlap to keep the bulk down, and glued them close.

I pre-punched the band, and starting from the middle I glued it around the corner and all along each edge of the liner. I edge finished the top where the stitching would go over the edge. I stitched the band in place and edge-finished the interior edge.

The gusset was lined with brio reinforcement. I attached the enchapes, using loctite on the sam browne stud to make sure it wouldn’t come undone. I stitched the zip strap holder to the gusset liner before gluing it down.

Now it was time for the final assembly. The gusset was pre-punched before being glued to the band.

Using the pre-punched holes I awled through the band and stitched the gusset to the band. I repeated the same on the other side.

The zipper strip was looped through its keeper and stitched on. All the remaining edges were finished.