My bag, baby.

I was using a bag I'd gotten for free at a conference to tote my music and other things to rehearsals this past year, and it was slowly driving me nuts. I like my bags to have water holsters on the outside, where I can see them and where damage can be swiftly lessened.

So, since messenger bags like that are oddly hard to find, I decided to sew myself one. Patterns for bags with water bottle holsters on the size are oddly hard to find, so I went with the only one that Simplicity had: 2924.

Yes, that's not a standard music bag. However, it has good bones; there are the holsters, it requires little in the way of modifications (the interior and exterior pockets will be great for gloves, posters, programs, pencils, throat drops, and all those other things), and it requires very little in the way of strange notions.

I now see why sewing bags is so popular. I'm sewing my first, and, only nine steps in, it's obviously a bag. I increased the size of the bottle holsters so that I could fit my Nalgene in there, and am putting a reflective stripe on the flap alone. It's surprisingly straightforward.

One thing that I did that seems to have helped is to put on a movie and batch cut the fabric and interfacing for this, the Heart of Mary/Italy bag, and New Look 6858. I bagged up each project in a big bag, and my hope is that this will make them head along more smoothly.