Art | Creativity | Crafts | Sewing

The Story of the Traveling Bag

A continuous creative project

I have this bag. It’s not just any old bag, though. It has seen a lot of this world.

I call it my traveling bag.

I can’t exactly remember where I purchased it but it was in a mall and I was traveling with my parents. I was certainly a teenager, somewhere between 16 and 19, and I can still see it hanging on the rack in the department store.

I don’t know precisely what drew me to it. Maybe it was the cool pattern and the fact that there is a different pattern on the inside, making it reversible. Maybe it was the sheer fact that I had my own money to spend and I was excited to find something to spend it on.

For one reason or the other, I was drawn to this bag, and it is clearly one of my most treasured possessions because it is still with me almost 30 years later! It even survived the big purge when we sold everything to travel full-time back in 2017, and it has been to many countries with me and my partner since.

Over time, as these things do, the bag started to deteriorate. We use it for absolutely everything, and since it is just plain cotton, it is not surprising. First, the strap started to fray — that was an easy fix. We found some strapping material in a market one day and I was able to hand sew the new one on. Instead of cutting the old strap right off, I cut it shorter and then sewed it onto the new strap. I also added a couple of loops in case we wanted to hook anything to the bag with a carabineer, ie. a water bottle.

I also sewed the new strap into the actual bag itself since there was a weak point where the strap met the bag.

When we were in Istanbul, Turkey, we came across a crafting shop that was an absolute dream to wander through. I would love to share all the video footage that I took of that shop that day because the things we saw in there were out of this world. Any creative person would have felt like they had died and gone to heaven.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have much money, so I wasn’t seriously shopping, only looking, but the one thing that I gravitated to was the packages and packages of patches that they had. By then, my beloved bag had started to spring holes in it and we were getting nervous about using it, worrying that it would tear beyond repair at some point — not to mention drop all of our vegetables, or whatever we were carrying, out the bottom of it.

I realized at that moment the patches were exactly what we needed to try and cover some of the holes in the bag. I was desperate to salvage it in any way that I could.

We could only buy packages of 10 patches that were mostly the same, but the packages were cheap — I think about $2–3 each. I purchased some funky mushrooms, some sugar skulls and a package of bees. The only one that I have an individual photo of is the bee — you can find the other ones on the bag, I’m sure.

I also bought some embroidery thread that day and started using it to strengthen the top edge of the bag, plus I used it to create decorative swirls. At that point, I figured that I would eventually embroider the whole bag. But alas, after realizing how much effort that would take, that dream didn’t last very long.

However, as you can see below, I did do some embroidery work and it did serve its purpose in further strengthening the weaker spots on the bag.

At this point, I had also started sewing other bits and pieces onto the bag. I had an old t-shirt that I got in Nepal that was falling apart. I cut out the parts that I wanted to keep and sewed them onto the bag. We also had volunteer shirts from a botanical garden that we volunteered at in the Caribbean in 2019, so I cut out the patches from those shirts and sewed them on.

I started to realize that I wanted this bag to be a representation of our travels and experiences, so we started looking for patches in countries that we visited, in order to add them to the bag. We had also been carrying around a patch from Canada that I had wanted to sew on something, and had not gotten around to it. Finally, I had a place for it.

Bit by bit, and slowly over time, I sewed bits and pieces onto the bag in a desperate bid to save it from its impending doom.

Here is the bag in 2022. It is easier to see the embroidery thread around the top edge, and I also used it to sew on the other pieces from my t-shirt. Yes, I got the shirt in 1996 while in Nepal. Call me nostalgic!

You may be wondering where the blue came from that is now on the strap. This happened while we were painting murals in Uganda. Our bag was with us close to where we were working when one of the staff dumped a can of blue paint on its side. We didn’t notice right away and by the time we did, the paint was half dry already.

Oh well, we surmised. It is a creative bag after all and we are mural painters. I guess it fits the theme!

The bag existed like this for quite a while. But, as you can imagine, the bare spots were not only getting dirtier and dirtier, but they were getting thinner and thinner as well. I knew that I needed to get more patches and up my production if I wanted to completely save this bag.

Fast forward to Canada in 2023 when we came back to visit family and friends plus get our finances sorted out. We were only meant to come back for a few months, but we quickly realized that we needed a longer break from traveling. It’s hard to believe that we have been back for almost a year now.

One day while visiting Chris’ mom, I had a sudden inspiration. She is a sewer and makes all sorts of things from fabric — quilts, aprons, and more. I figured that she had some fabric scraps around, and maybe I could use some to sew onto the bag to strengthen it better.

“Do you happen to have any fabric scraps lying around?” I asked her one day.

“Ha! Do I?” She guffawed.

If you work with fabrics, you know what a ridiculous question that is. She took me down to her sewing room and showed me a literal dresser full of fabric scraps.

“Take anything you want.” She told me.

I was in heaven.

I rifled through the drawers, pulling out patterns I liked, then cut out the sections that I wanted on the bag, and then busily got to sewing them on. I used a zig-zag stitch and just stitched them directly onto the bag without worrying too much about how it all looked. My main goal was to strengthen the bag, I wasn’t worried about perfection.

A few hours later, I emerged from the basement to show her my creation. Knowing how precise she is with her sewing, I do wonder what she really thought — but she did say that she liked it.

If nothing else, it is certainly a lot more colorful now!

As you can see, we have also found some other patches of places we have visited and have added them to the mix. Over time, I hope to continue adding these and hope that it becomes a patchwork of our travels, carrying its own stories of our adventures with it.

These days the bag is much stronger and I know now that it will last the test of time. I still don’t know how or why it became one of my most treasured possessions, but I look forward to using it for many years to come.

This story was inspired by another Share Your Creativity writer, Chloe ~ Calendula Craft and her article about creating a memory quilt.

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