Actually there’s a whole body of work to draw on without going to pioneering extremes – traditional handwoven clothes. Great stuff like Egyptian shirts where you take wedges out of the top to make gussets for the bottom. I still wear my 80s Miyake coat where you cleverly slash and wrap the 5 yards of wool in one piece, and you’re left only with a piece perfect to make the patch pockets. Aaaah. Now that’s design.. Those of you who’ve ever spun and woven any length of cloth can relate, I’m sure.

For a rundown on all the entries in the leather bag series, see this one.

I must attempt something like this for leather, a most important material to be precious with. Of course many bags are much simpler than this, and rectangles don’t cause waste unless one makes a mistake. Also there is always waste in leather, I know, unless the designer uses a lot of raw edge stuff. Which is cute.

Actually I already factored something like this into a bag that has a few diagonal lines. I planned the cutting and made 4 pieces with diagonal edges from 2 longer rectangles. Actually it was a bit intimidating even that way. I do get quite paranoid about mistakes or misfiguring.

Perhaps I’d skip this for rectangles unless it actually helps speed things up.

Thanks again Kathleen, and everyone for the kind comments.