Final Bag

Overall I feel the bag I created was a sucsess it shows link to the theme of fairground from the twisted leather and shows clear links to the artist Llane Alexis from the colour scheme and the textural effect of the weave. I found the sewing together of the leather quite tricky because on some parts it was several layers and others only two layers. I feel that this unit has taught me some vital skills in leather which is something I never had, these skills will be something ill take forward in my further practice.

WEEK 4- Leather and Sheep-Skin

This week was the week of the construction of my bag, I began with the strap as it was the longest piece of my bag and so would hypothetically take the longest amount of time, my thinking was that after making the strap I would get an inkling as to how much waxed thread I would use and the amount of time it would take to sew the bag. Robin showed my two different ways of making the strap one quicker and the other more time consuming, I chose the latter one as I felt it gave a more professional finish to the strap.

constructing the strap was a very time consuming process however I found that it took much less waxed thread than I initially though it would do. I then sewed the back to the width of the bag and began constructing my woven front piece. I cut a variety of thickness' and colour blue and black strips of leather and played around with the placement. I wrapped strips of leather around other strips to create the circular pattern I had seen on the heltaskelta and candy floss sticks and used these more textural strips within my weave. The weaving process itself I found quite fiddly as the leather would move around in the weave and so I decided to add a small amount of glue to the edges of each strip to keep it in place this was very efficient as it kept all the strip in the correct placement and the process became allot simpler.

WEEK 3- Leather and Sheep-Skin

After looking back through my research I had decided that I would create a woven front to my bag, I knew that the company which sold and suplied the leather would be coming later on in the day. For weaving I would only need strips of leather and as I wanted my colour scheme to be a variety of blues I didn't want to buy lots of large leathers.I worked with the group and explained that I was creating a woven front and so would need strips of any blue leathers and they were very helpful and I gained a variety of coloured blue leather.

At around eleven o'clock the spokesman for the company came in to sell the group leathers of our choice at the discounted price of five pounds.Before selling us the skins he explained how there were many different types of leather and different animal from which they come from I learnt that pig suede could be bought and is a well used material this was something I was oblivious to before the talk. Throughout the talk the man kept reiterating how their company was an ethical company and all of its leathers and skins were a by product of the meat industry and the animals were not killed purely for their skins. I hadn't realised that using leather bothered me slightly however once I found out that the skins with only a by product my mind was settled and I felt allot more comfortable using the materials. I purchased the leather that I would use for the side panels back and strap of the bag and so after lunch began making my pattern

As I learnt from making my paper bag in the first week, I was very exact about the measurements when creating my pattern and so the process of creating my pattern and transferring it onto the leather was something I found quite simple and enjoyable. However when it came to my strap I didn't have enough leather left and had to go into another pieces with a lighter tone this didn't matter as I was creating a woven front to my bag I could just incorporate the straps leather into the weave, from this I learnt that if I was to do it again I wound create and have my pattern pieces with me whilst choosing the leather to make sure I had enough.