Toiletries bag — Ra's Workshop

Toiletries bag, weekender usable prototype

I made this as a weekender prototype. I had recently received a shipment of Premium Bit Shrink and Fuwari from Hashimoto, so it seemed like a good opportunity to use it.

I sketched out a shape, but making it on graph paper was doing my head in. I just couldn’t figure out how to make arcs that would meet at an angle. So I made a little playdoh version, chopped the sides at the angle I wanted the side panels to be, and traced the shape out on baking paper.

Now that I had a rough idea of the bag shape I drew it up more accurately on LibreCAD. I printed out a small version and prototyped it using some leather split. Shapes looked good, just needed to be mindful of lopping off the top where the zipper would go.

Next up was the quilting. I tried out some samples using fabric, but it didn’t look fantastic. I’m not very great at sewing straight lines with a sewing machine so I went with making it in leather.

Prototypes are all about trying different techniques. For the leather quilting panels I tried a few different things. On one panel I sandwiched Oslo between two panels of leather, punched straight through and stitched. I trimmed before hand on this one, realised I’d messed up right after I made the cut, and added a strip of leather to the bottom because I’d just hacked off the seam allowance. The result was a nice quilted look, but unsightly stitches on the back.
On the second panel I stitched through one layer of leather and Oslo to see if the quilting effect would be preserved, and backed the Oslo after it was stitched with the second panel of leather as a way to hide the stitches. This didn’t turn out very well, the quilting effect was completely lost and it looked flat, but the back sure looked clean.
If I had to pick an option I’d pick the first one. Experimenting with backing the Oslo with something else and then gluing the leather panel on that is also an option worth exploring.

The picture above is a great example of why skiving edges is important, no matter how thin your leather seems to be.

The quilted panels’ heights were all off, so I had to fill in the space with a strip of leather.

Top: Flat-looking quilted panel; Bottom: Puffier quilted panel

After cutting out the rest of the parts I skived them using a bell skiver. The seam allowance I’m using for the prototype is 5mm, the skive is slightly wider than that.

I edge-finished the ends that would be attached to the zipper. I forgot to crease before painting, oh well, we live and learn.

After painting those edges, I attached the two body panels to the base. I sized the zip and stitched that on too. Next was putting the side panels on. I marked the centre points of each side panel’s bottom, and shorter base side, lined them up and used double-sided tape to hold it in place. The arced sides of the side panels were attached to the main body with glue. Once glued in place I punched a stitch line 5mm in from the edge and stitched, sandwiching a pull tab between the side panel and zip.

The end result of the connection point between zips and pull tabs left much room for improvement. This is an area I’d pay more attention to when I make the final version.