One sports bag...

It's finished! That bag I told you about. Unfortunately, I didn't get it done in time to take it on our climbing trip last weekend (more about that in the next post) but after today, it can take our harnesses, shoes and other gear to the climbing gym and on future trips to real rock. 

These are just some quick pictures to show you the bag. I stuffed it with a pillow and put it on the living room floor to get the shots. I will post a proper in-action picture later so you can get a better idea about the scale of the thing.

It is actually fairly small for this type of bag because I was restricted by the amount of material I had. This last weekend, I saw the type of bag this one was inspired by in use by other climbers. That did help me get a better idea about the use of its various features. It was too late to change anything about this one but I will keep that in mind for a next version. 

In addition to the features I have shown you before (like that U-shaped zipper!). My bag has short handles next to the zipper and at one end. It is all made from the same black fabric/plastic with 5 cm wide black straps and 2.5 cm wide red straps. 

I attached the shoulder strap with D-rings and it has one slide adjuster. And I even made one of those pad-things for carrying comfort. 

When all of that was finished, I didn't like the sadly collapsed look of it and decided to give the edges a bit of body. I did that by hand-stitching some old phone wire to the seam allowances (old and no longer useable. I kept this stuff for a couple of years thinking it might one day be useful for a sewing project...). Of course, the best way of including something like this would have been to encase it in a strip of fabric and sew that into those seams so it would be on the outside, like bulky piping. Live and learn...