This bag was for my sister. She had some dimension requirements, and one request of “lots of pockets, including in the flap” to paraphrase. So I got to sketching.
I’m never quite sure how much someone wants to be involved in the process when I make them things. Maybe she thought I was bugging her too much about a simple bag, or maybe she thought “hey this is bespoke so I have all the input!”. Who knows.
This bag was a real challenge. I thought I knew how I wanted to construct it, but I changed my mind at the very last minute. I made a paper prototype, saw where dimensions needed to be tweaked, and then got to prepping the leather.
I learned to always, always, check how much dye you have left. I thought I had enough. I did not. Almost 3/4 way through the second coat I completely ran out. I was sponging the sides of the container to get as much as possible, but in the end I had to place a rushed order for more. That’s the danger of letting dye dry, then going back to fix it. That’s also the danger of dyeing in the first place. If this was a paying customer, I’d have gotten a pre-dyed piece of leather. I managed to cut around the worst transition points, or hide them in pockets, but still, lesson learned.
I had decided to make this a proper challenge:
use 3mm french irons (I’d just recently received Kevin Lee’s irons and hadn’t had a chance to use them yet)
use vinymo mbt 8 (a thread I’ve only heard good things about, but had zero experience with)
I think I finally learned how to stitch correctly with this project. The number of times I looked up Little Leather Co’s story on how to saddle stitch will have completely skewed his Instagram Insight numbers for that week. Oh yes, did I mention that there was a time limit on this?
When you’re in a rush you tend to make mistakes, even when you’re careful. I had a disastrous issue when trying to edge dye the flap prior to burnishing. Yes, I cried. Then I sucked it up, trimmed the edge, and got on with the bag. This was another very valuable lesson learned.
I’d never tried a full gusset, so hey, why not just wrap everything I’ve never done into one project? A challenge is a challenge. It turned out okay. I should have added the enchapes before stitching the gusset, but to be honest I had no idea how they would turn out, where they would sit on the gusset, would I need to trim the final gusset when it was done? It was all up in the air, so I just did it afterwards, with great difficulty.
The drop liner, thank god, I made a prototype of. It was too large. A great lesson was learned on how fabric behaves compared to leather even at exactly the same dimensions. I made the final liner out of linen, which is a lovely material to use for liners. I think I might even rip out the liner in my Ovi bag and replace it with nice linen.
Build album here.