Made for a 3D design project.
Brief: Make a wearble thing based on our super sculpey sculptures.
Illustrator: Drafting
Sewing machine
I wanted a more fun way to run around campus, so I decided to turn my fella into a bag.
The Drafting Process
I started out by trying to figure out the dimensions of the bag that I wanted. I decided that matching the size of my current messenger bag would be the best way to go.
I got bored while drafting one night and threw temporary googly eyes onto the model. I then forgot to remove them before sending them off to be printed onto canvas.
Dying and Cleaning
Something during this process is that there is a lot of extra dye, from printing on canvas, that needs to be washed off.
I spent a good hour making sure that 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 in washing off the fabric.
Pockets galore!
Something that I really like about my current messenger bag is the amount of pockets and partitions it has. I attempted to implement this by having fin and ear pockets.
The primary fins were enlarged to be able to house more things in the final product.
You can see me trying to work out the ear pockets, but they did not make it into the final piece.
Misc WIP Images
that was probably my fourth or fifth trip back to Joann's because I was uncertain about what I wanted and I had finally made a choice on a lot of things.
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.
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.
I placed a bag of polyfill into the bag to better fill it out. Bro looks like he's smoking a phat one.
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.
It's funny shoving big things into the mouth.
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 I was a little too small.
But I think that this was a good outcome for my first foray into bag design with no help from experienced accessory designers.
