I’ve had this Drumstick bag (with a separate, padded bag for bells to go in the top of the bag) on my to-do list for a few weeks. Originally it was supposed to be a striped bag, but I was sufficiently a fan of the bargello style bag I did a week ago, that I wanted to do another. So the stripes are diagonal.
The essence of a bargello pattern is that you sew a number of strips together. You put those strips into a tube, and then you slice the tube at varying widths (in this case, 2 1/2″, 2″, 1 1/2″, and 1″ slices), and then undo various seams in the tube until you get the diagonal pattern. Getting this right is a pain, but the results are interesting to look at and to play with. In this case, because it’s a bag with a shoulder strap, I also added in an extra element: I sewed the bargello body onto a separate piece of cotton cloth, so that there’s an extra layer behind all those seams. Even if a seam comes undone, the bag itself will remain strong and continue to hold together.
