Leslie’s Bag

All this bag stuff started years ago when my friend Jane Dickson saved a few of her canvas scraps for me, because she knows I’m crafty & recycle-y. I tucked them away and some stray moment months later pulled them out and started thinking about them. Folded this way it’s like a bag side, folded this way it’s like a bag strap and if I cut and sew here then there’s a built in pocket. I pulled out a bit of upholstery vinyl for the bottom and decided I liked it so much that I should make another one! In just a few hours I had these two simple, comfortable, machine washable bags. They were somewhere between a high slung messenger bag, a tote, and a shoulder bag. And it was almost my friend Leslie Baum’s birthday! One of fashion’s early adopters, I suspected it would be right up her alley. It was! She proceeded to take it to yoga twice a week and and every trip she took for the next three years.

I used mine just as much if not more. I would often get stopped on the street and asked about my unusual bag and enjoyed cooing that I had made it my self thank you!

I would even have people suggest that I really should make and sell them. I dismissed these suggestions as idle flattery. And besides, everyone knows that handmade just doesn’t ever pay what it should for the time it takes to make, right?

It wasn’t until years later when I had finally let go of my last client (I used to do business management for artists and small creative businesses) that my thoughts turned back to Leslie’s bag. I was exhausted of making other people’s creative dreams come true, only to come home to wiped out to even turn on my sewing machine, let alone try to wrap my mind around making Art.

I needed to change my way of making money to something(s) that I really loved doing, and I didn’t want to work for anyone else any more. Why not just try it, try making and selling something you really love? I made five more bags in different sizes took photos of them and posted them to my new free Etsy Shop. Then I gave them to my friends for field testing. It took a few months, but I finally sold a bag on Etsy! Elated. Then I sold another!

Leslie finally requested a new bag in leather please, but otherwise exactly the same. Delighted, this was what I came up with: