Back to work

I took a few days off last week but am back in work-mode now and have some new bags finished and ready to share. I’m still without my digital camera since it was stolen a couple of weeks ago, so afraid I will be relying on scanned images and polaroids for the time being which isn’t ideal (or particularly cheap!) but they give you an idea of what I have been up to. (I’m also treating my polaroid film like gold-dust since I heard it was being discontinued aaah!)

Anyway, I started working on making a medium-sized leather cross body bag. I had the idea in mind for a while, since I’m going to the 2000 trees festival in a couple of weeks I wanted to make a bag I could take with me. I’m not a festival-going expert by any means, but I imagined that a bag that didn’t need to be held and was large enough to fit everything in but not too big to end up being my portable rubbish bin, would be perfect.

So I put some thoughts to paper and ended up with a basic shape constructed with front and back panels and a gusset.

Above is a page out of my sketch book, excuse the poor quality (scan and drawing)!

Next stage was to draw out a rough pattern and make it up as a fabric toile to see the proportions in 3D. I was pretty happy with the results in fabric so I cut out the first mock-up using this piece of brown leather I had left over from one of the Lily bags:

Here’s a shot below of the bag without the strap.

You don’t get to see all the detail as it’s a scanned image but you get the idea.

The idea behind folding the top of the bag over is to make a much safer way of closing up a bag, because I find with cross-body bags, as they swing behind you a lot of the time, its good to have a safe and secure top. Being in a city probably makes me more aware of that, but it’s a good feature to bear in mind.

Anyway, it was at this stage before I added on the handles that I realised the pattern could probably be adapted really well to make a good size clutch bag. So I tried it out using some lovely pink leather.

Again, above the scan is not great but better than no picture at all. The pink leather has a coating which gives the shimmer texture and also means the leather is a little heavier which works better for a clutch. I prefer clutches to have a bit more structure and bags with straps to be a bit more floppy.

So overall I am very pleased with the results and am working on adding the straps on to the brown leather bag. For the clutches I think they could work really well in some nice bright colours of leather perhaps. With a bit more work to the pattern I’m hoping to be able to add some more into the shop soon.