New tote bag

I recently took an hour or two to stitch together a new tote bag. I have a stash of materials for this because a sewing company in Brooklyn's 'Industry City' (an isolated business park) was going out of business. I regret not buying out much more of the inventory: at that point I was laser-focused on sewing projects for the outdoors, like my Porteur bag v2 and v1.

But there's a lot of fun in sewing with real cloth for less extreme circumstances.

For one thing, cotton is a different material than the laminated sailcloth fabric that I primarily use for bikepacking bags. Cotton comes apart at the edges, so I used a zigzag stitch to try and this edge from fraying. The proper solution to this is using an overlocker, a machine with four threads and an automatic cutter. But that's another big device in the apartment and my sewing materials corner is big enough as it is.

Strap adjustment is becoming a familiar challenge. On the porteur bags, I started off with bungee straps, which can be adjusted in a lot of different ways by leashing the bag to a rack differently or creating knots, but the elastic works against you when riding a bike fast and through the woods.

For this I just used a tri-glide buckle, which uses friction to stay in place. It's a part that I've encountered in so many manufactured things that I've owned but never really thought about.

You'll notice that there's an unnecessary amount of stitching on this bag: three stitches down each side. In theory these serve three different purposes:

1. The first straight stitch is for strength
2. The zigzag stitch is to keep the material from fraying
3. The topstitch keeps the facing flat

But the other, perhaps more important reason is that I just wanted to spend longer making this thing. I think it's good to automate things you dislike doing and de-automate and stretch out the time you spend doing things you like.

The top of the bag where the material just folds over ever so slightly was using basting tape. I really like basting tape as a cheat code: it's a two-sided tape that you can leave in the bag. If you apply a strip of it at the edge of a fabric, you can fold over the fabric to adhere the other side of the tape and it serves as both a way to hold the fabric in place without using clips, and also an easy way to 'measure' that fold, because the fold ends up being the same height as the tape.

The reinforcement for the straps could be neater: I still envy the bagmakers that can produce those perfect reinforcement "X" marks on these parts. A lot of the technique here involves doing straight stitch, stopping the machine with the needle in the fabric, and rotating the fabric so that you can then continue in a new direction. My mom taught me that trick and it was one of many things that seem both clever and obvious in hindsight. It's fun to do.

Speaking of obvious in hindsight, I didn't want to make this tote bag in the traditional way with a strap on each side. Those bags always fall off my shoulder, especially in the winter wearing a big coat. So one big, adjustable strap was the way to go. But I realized that there's a relationship between the width of the strap attachment points and whether a bag can be carried on the shoulder or cross-body. Since this is so wide - the attachment points at the sides of the bag - if you carry this on the shoulder, the bag essentially opens because your shoulder is narrower than it. I could add a closure system here, like a snap or a zipper, but I like it simple as it is and don't plan on carrying it on a shoulder anyway.

I like it. It's yellow, feels pretty good to carry, plenty big enough for groceries. Sewing this kind of fabric feels pretty easy, though you do have to pay a little more attention to it than the space-age laminated polyesters. Hopefully it gets me closer to being able to sew more delicate fabrics, which will require actually learning how to manage tension on the machine.

Sewing: I recommend it.