The Saga of the Bag, Parts 5-180

Oh, the bag. I have made progress. If I had taken pictures, I would show you them as proof! (Crap. BRB.)

It's dusk, so the pictures are terrible. The bag is also kind of terrible, so, woo for truth in advertising, I guess.

O hai! I am a bag, lounging here next to a tiny patch of grass where dogs pee!

Here's the front.

Love that flash!


Here's a shot of the inside - you can see the cut-in pocket in the front, the inside lining, and the lining of the flap.




Looking down into the bag, the main compartment and the back pockets.


Action shot! Don't my clothes look awful? You should see my hair!

The best word for this is "unwieldy." It has been unwieldy since its inception. Putting the lining in was difficult for the simple reason that I don't have four hands. The walls of the bag are rather droopy and uneven, so coming up with a lining that fit took multiple attempts. Before I sewed the lining in, actually, the part of me acknowledging reality was rather baleful about the whole thing. (Luckily, the part of me in charge of moving forward with the project was still blindly optimistic.)

It actually looks a whole lot better than I feared it would before I sewed everything down. It helps that I really love how lining sewed with a blind hem stitch to felted fabric looks.

It looks okay enough, but really, it does not function well. I declared myself done, after a marathon, bone-crushing sewing session yesterday, and packed it up and walked to work this morning. About five seconds into that walk, it became obvious that by the time I got to work the strap might have stretched to the point where the body of the bag was dragging on the ground. Clearly, reinforcement is needed.

(As a side note, why is my stuff so freaking heavy? I was carrying a thin notebook, a thin novel, a digital camera, Pouchy Thing, a small frozen lunch, two pens, and a tiny first aid kit that consists of a few band-aids, and it felt like a dozen bowling balls.)

So, five seconds into the walk, I decided that a much longer strap would tip the balance and truly render the bag untenable and unusable, so I did what I had to do and walked for 35 minutes with the stupid thing tucked under my arm. There's a good way to look insane. At least on the way home I had the insight to take all the items out, put them in the plastic bag that held my lunch on the way in, and let the bag sag under its own weight only.

At work, I set it on the floor, and realized that even trying to get things in and out of the bag is difficult because I don't have four hands. It's a little too tall for its droopiness and the front flap gets in the way. It slumps onto whatever surface it's put on.

I suppose I'll soldier on and sew a lining to the underside of the strap in order to keep it from stretching out. I've had many happy thoughts of this being ready before I fly home for a week so I can take it as my carry-on, instead of the godawful North Face Twelve Pound, Four Pounds of Which Are Unnecessary Straps backpack I've been dragging around for three years.

Oh, and the Pastaza, even after felting and shaving, is so prickly that it literally scratches me through my clothes. I see on Rav that people have made and not immediately denounced scarves out of the stuff, so maybe I just got a particularly hateful batch, but I cannot imagine wearing this next to my skin.

So, to recap: Pastaza = bad, Bagorooni = unwieldy, slightly too big, and not done (whimper), me = still optimistic.