I've been reading the new Sally Rooney novel, Intermezzo. It's really beautiful. The perfect kind of novel to read slowly. She manages to write prose that's engaging at the micro and macro levels - beautiful sentences, as well as lovely long narrative arcs. I've been trying to read the dialog with an Irish accent in my head.
It's a good book for reading in a park, and in Brooklyn we have a lot of nice little neighborhood parks. There's one right next to my apartment, public albeit under a confusing non-city ownership. Getting back from a long day of working on the internet, I want to throw that book in a bag and spend some time reading. But my bags are all the wrong size, too small or so large that the book lays horizontally at the bottom, which annoys me.
Following along with CW&T's newsletter, Kevin Lynagh, Casey Neistat, and others, I've gained an appreciation of people who create their own tools in real life, not just on the computer.
A sewing machine has unlocked a new domain of life where I feel free to do that. It's both supposedly practical and a crucial emotional-life crutch to be able to make something tangible as a respite from the virtual.
So I made a bag just for this one book. The Intermezzo bag. The dimensions are just based on fitting this one item, a book that I'll finish in a 120 pages anyway, and then it'll be more of a toss-up which books it will fit.
I did a minimum of planning for this project: the book, plus some tolerance, plus some reference points for details. The idea was to make the bag flat, unlike other things I've made, in the musette genre of bag shapes.
I had some accessory rope that I wanted to use to make a sort of sacoche which I hadn't gotten to yet, and some D-rings from previous projects. The main material is the same from the porteur bag 2 and original frame bag: ECOPAK 200D from Rockywoods. Unbelievably overkill for this project, but I like it and the way it holds shape.
The internet is so good for learning knots, I used animated knots.com for these. The important one is the adjustable grip hitch, which makes the strap adjustable. Works super well, and it's nice to have one less piece of 'hardware' and instead just rely on the physics and friction of knots.
The quiet drama was whether it would actually fit the book, which is not an easy thing to guarantee because flexible fabric and uncertain seam tolerances add up in a fuzzy way during a project like this.
