What was turned in
There were a more few minor changes of hemming and whip stitching the mouth for a cleaner finish and stitching the water bottle fin together.
Drafted the Pattern in Illustrator
Stitched and pieced the fabric together using a sewing machine and hand stitching techniques.
Brief
Make a wearable thing, any type of object, based on the super sculpey sculptures you made in a previous assignment.
Concept
What would my sculpture look like if was reconceptualized into a sling bag.
The Drafting Process
I decided that matching this to the size of my current messenger bag would be the best way to go.
Dying and Cleaning
There is a lot of extra dye printed onto the fabric that needs to be washed off. I spent a good hour, and at least 10 wash rinse cycles, making sure the water was clear and all the excess dye was washed off.
A little aside - The employees really liked my design and they were also impressed by how thorough I was when washing the fabric.
Pockets galore!
Something that I really like about my current messenger bag is the amount of pockets and partitions it has.
Ear pockets were conceptualized but were cut from the final product.
Misc WIP Images
several several several trips to JoAnn's later, I had everything I needed.
I was running into some slipping issues with the pleather, so I tried using paper. It worked, but I ended up spending more time cleaning out the paper bits from the seams.
I also tried out saddle stitching for the first time. It was freehand and I will definitely mark the fabric in the future for more consistent stitches.
Changes Afterwards
I revisited the project a couple months later and added on the zipper teeth, leather trim, and overall cleaned up the stitching more now that I had more time to focus on it.
I think that this was a good learning opportunity. I was able to work through the process of patter drafting, fabric printing, and then sewing using the printed marks.
I would like to revisit this project from scratch sometime in the future and make a more practical bag. This one does not hold its shape very well, the straps are very small and slip, the bag doesn't really look good outside of a few angles or lying flat on the ground, etc...
I also tried to scale the bag up to allow for full size sketchbooks to fit into it, but it was a little too small.
I think that this was a good outcome for my first foray into bag design with no help from experienced accessory designers.
