Jayeblog

If you see me walking around campus, or around town, or (starting very soon) around the city, you’ll almost always see me wearing a messenger bag on my back. I catch shit for it sometimes—people tease me about having a “man-purse“. I shrug it off, but in a way it’s true. Why do women carry purses? Sure, a lot of purses nowadays are intended as fashion statements, but their underlying purpose remains: women carry purses because they have stuff that they want to carry with them all the time. Isn’t this desire found in men too? There are some things that don’t fit into my pockets that I want to carry with me all the time: a book, a folder for carrying papers, a collection of pens and markers, a laptop (sometimes), etc. So damn the critics, I carry my bag with me as often as I can.

I started looking at messenger-style bags four years ago, as I prepared to go to college for the first time. I had just bought my first laptop, and wanted a nice bag to carry it to and from class. As I shopped around (and, admittedly, I have since discovered that I wasn’t really looking in the best places back then), I began to get discouraged that none of the bags I saw really matched what I was looking for. And the ones I did find that seemed up to my standards were holy-shit-expensive.

So, being who I am, I designed my own. My first schematics were far from professional, but the design in my head worked perfectly. Why buy an expensive bag that might not meet my needs, I thought, when I can build my own to my exact specifications? I’ve since then made three bags for myself (and two for friends), each one building on lessons learned from the last. I’ve learned a lot about bag construction in the process, and grown to appreciate some of the features and designs of “luxury” messenger bag brands such as Timbuk2 and Manhattan Portage.

Version One of the bag was constructed the summer before departing for RIT with help from my friend Arielle. I had a general idea of what I wanted and she had a general idea of how to put it together and what we came up with could certainly be described as “a bag”, although when compared to the next two versions it’s horribly primitive.

The second version of the bag came two years later, with help from my friend Anna. It was significantly smaller (since I had recently traded my Giant Dell Laptop for a much smaller Macbook), and abandoned the five-panel structure of Version One in favor of a one-piece design. I’ve already written about it, so I won’t repeat myself here. If you care to learn more about Version Two, just read this blog post from two years ago.

Version Two got pretty close, but it still wasn’t perfect. The fabric I chose for the interior proved to be horribly suited for the job, wearing and tearing in a dozen places around the edges and corners of the bag. After two years of constant user, my beloved mesh pockets had begun to do the same. And I still wasn’t completely satisfied with the construction of the bag. The “ears” that attach the D-rings to the top of the bag (see the brown strips of belting on either side of the bag in the picture above) are unsightly and dumb, but at the time I couldn’t figure out how to do without them. So, after two years of heavy use of Version Two, I decided it was time for Version Three.

This time I contacted my friend Megan to help me out. She runs her own little craft store called Megnificent Made and does quite a bit of creative sewing through that: coloring books, purses, giant fabric tea-party sets… you know, the usual stuff. I knew she’d have the skills to help me out, and she had enough experience that she was able to suggest some changes to my “pattern” that would never have occurred to me on my own.

While the Version Three bag is largely the same as Version Two, it departs in a few important ways. It has one extra pocket, on the left panel inside the bag. The interior fabric is now the same as the exterior fabric (blue instead of black); after seeing how well the exterior fabric has held up on the first two versions of the bag and how poorly the interior fabrics have held up on both, this seemed fairly obvious. Likewise, the mesh has been eliminated from the bag altogether, for two reasons: the mesh didn’t wear very well, and I couldn’t find the right mesh to use this time around. So it’s all been replaced with fabric.

On Meg’s advice we modified the one-piece design, sewing the two “arms” (the left and right sides of the bag) separately from the main body and attaching them afterwards. The front, bottom, and back of the bag are still one piece, so we didn’t sacrifice any support or structure, but attaching the arms separately allowed Meg to properly finish the corners and sew the whole thing up easier. There are now almost no visible seams on body of the bag, inside and out.

The biggest departure from Version Two, as you may have noticed, is the elimination of the ears. The D-rings that clip into the shoulder strap are now secured by a piece of belting that’s sewn into the structure of the bag instead of attached externally. Additionally, the belting that holds the D-rings is a single piece, running all the way through the bottom of the bag to add extra support. The uneasy feeling I used to get when overloading Version One or Version Two of the bag with books and my laptop is gone! Now I can stuff the bag to the brim and not worry about catastrophic fabric failure.

The only shortcoming of Version Three is how plain it looks—I was never really happy with the print I chose for the front of Version Two, but seeing how boring Version Three looks without one I know I’m gonna have to do something about it. I’ve just go to figure out what I can put on there that will add some interest without taking away from how classy the bag looks right now.

So there you have it! Version Three of the bag is done and in use. It’s still a bit stiff-feeling, but in three or four weeks it’ll be broken in and feel like I’ve been using it for years.