For my sister’s birthday, I was going to make her a messenger style bag for her laptop. What I actually gave her was a promise for her birthday and then finally finished the actual bag about a month later. I know, I stink, but the bag turned out even better than I thought it would. So, on one hand, I’m sort of glad I took the time to make it the right way and the way I thought it should be.
The Messenger Bag Laptop carrier
It’s got an adjustable strap (way easy, by the way. I was intimidated by it when I thought about adding it, but it was one of the easiest parts) and a front flap (with rounded corners, even! I love rounded corners on messenger bags 🙂 ).
Messenger bag front with adjustable strap
On the inside, it’s got one large pocket that’s laptop sized and it’s padded. For the padding, oddly enough, I used the Warm Tater batting by Warm and Natural. It’s thicker than regular cotton batting, but not quite as thick as doubling it. I thought it was the perfect weight for providing a little extra bump protection without bulking up the bag too much. And, I also have enough left over to make myself a potato bag, if I so feel like it.
It’s got two front pockets, one large enough for a charger and then a misc. sized smaller pocket. The pockets are two inches deep, making for a little bit of an adventure as I had to figure out how to keep the top from flopping all over the place. It seemed loose enough to dump out the contents, if the carrier was carlessly carousing. Knowing what I know now, I’d have cut the pockets to be angled in towards the top so the bottom was two inches while the top was only about one or so. As it was, I think I managed to get the tops pulled in and still keep the depth at the bottom. I’m hoping to work out a repeatable, patterned version of the pockets and turn it into a tutorial sometime soon.
The bag has one large pocket and two pockets on the front
I learned a lot on this project, just about how to keep the quality high even when I’m kind of figuring things out. I think that there was a step up in quality of my work a bit on this one. Maybe not in a way that you can see by looking at the bag, but in more my ability to get the pattern figured out and get it all assembled, and then recover from the mistakes I made while assembling it and still finish it decently.
Messenger bag Inside and out
One thing I hate about carrying my laptop around is also having to lug around my (way too over-stuffed) purse along with me. So, I made a wristlet purse that matched the bag. Because I made it rather last minute, I didn’t get any pictures taken yet, but hopefully, my sister will model it for me soon and I’ll include that too.
I mentioned getting the tutorial for the pockets done, but I’m also dreaming about getting both the messenger bag and the wristlet into a pattern. When I was searching for a good laptop bag pattern, nothing fit the bill to me like this design. Anybody interested in seeing a pattern for this?