Wednesday 18 February 2009

Leather Bag's Pockets

I bought this little buckle and made a pattern for this decorative fastening. It's uneasy to snip these curved shapes with scissors or rotary cutter - this time I used my modelling scalpel. I also couldn't use the thing I still don't know the name of to mark regular distances between stitches. So I just made holes at important points and then serched for halves between them, and then halves between these halves:)

I marked the center of the lid and the body of the bag with a sellotape. I placed the leaf on it and transferred the holes to the right spot.

I used the two-needle straight stitch again. I tried the whole thing, so that I could find out the right length of the straps and insert the buckle. Now, after having sewn this fastening, I was lucky to find out it's probably period. Look here:-)

The bag could already be used, but it still seemed too simple and uninteresting to me.
If you had been hunting for some medieval bags' pictures, you must have notices this type of spherical side pockets. My grateful thanks for these photos belong to Tristán.
I also took inspiration from this really uncredible blog.

I made this pattern for the pockets. The original paper pattern was then used for making the right shape of the line of holes on the bag. Again, I was punching with a bunch of fabric in the bag.

I couldn't help myself with the marker of distances, I had to just guess where the next hole should be.. Then, one more line was done above the previous, always between each two holes.

You might have noticed the holes on the pockets were made quite far from the edge. I folded this excess inside and whip-stitched the pockets to the body of the bag. This required a lot of tightening and a lot of wax:)

They were too flat and didn't form nice spheres. Too thick leather and stitches outside the pockets I guess. You could have seen a curve at the top of the pockets' pattern. To flatten them, I made the arch more shallow. I symmetrically cut the middles of the pockets and then finished each part separately with scissors.

As I don't have my hole punchers here, you must wait for the finish until I get home:)