Xtracycle Bags for a Michigan Winter Commuter - 90% Salvaged Materials
Made sides out of three different kinds of fire hose. Yellow hose is from a jaunt in the woods with Jake awhile back.
Here are the sides sewn in, with some bling firehose trim that also provides a tunnel for a supporting frame that is made out of wire and scrap aluminum tubing.
Front has reflective trim and backpack cordura.
Other than rivets and thread, the snaps and webbing are the only virgin materials in this project.
Inside pockets are scraps from some other old backpacks.
In action
He has only had it for a few days. Give him a few weeks and it will be full of loose change, receipts, food wrappers, diapers, wipes, a vice-grip, headlamp, swim trunks, lip gloss, and maybe a few Sierra Nevada bottle caps. Mine is.
We'll make you one out of your favorite old backpack - your bike-based life will never be the same.
I used a torch to braze the broken ears back on.
Under the flap is more necktie and map. Mark is a few years older than me and his dad was my track coach/crafts teacher in high school. Mark has been studying music for most of his life with influences all over the world ranging from Ravi Shankar to old slave songs. He came back to town when I was still in high school to regale us with tales of traveling around the West Coast juggling, making music, falling in love, and being offered a blowjob by a strange traveling salesman while hitchhiking across Eastern Washington. He knew how to make weird Vietnamese-shaped hats out of felt, and spent a few weeks telling us stories and teaching us to juggle, playing music, and generally blowing our smalltown minds. Then he was off again.
Old camo as a nod to shared millpond roots. This project brought up memories of growing up in Westwood, and the interweaving of lives there. Of track practice in the gym with 6 feet of snow outside, or running on melting slush through streams of icy runoff; of shooting guns at the sewer ponds with Dean Growden - Mark's brother who is now Lassen County Sheriff.
Or of the 1970s Cutlass that Mark's younger brother - my best friend Jeremy, filled up with gas one day during our senior year and just drove away.
And Mark has always been flamboyant, of course, so I had an excuse to go big with the bag. People in Westwood are still probably talking about the time that they turned on 'Real Sex' on HBO and saw Mark there in some sort of men's tantra workshop circle thingy. My crew boss marking timber for the US Forest Service told me that he had the episode on videotape.
For wild Middle Eastern circus music, and a tambourine.
Mark's sister Janay makes amazing clothing, window displays, and anything else. We painted flowers and peace signs on her VW bus before we knew that we weren't really hippies, or that hippies weren't really very cool, and drove it down Highway 32 to Chico to shop for school clothes at Pegasus, wondering why the guys in the big trucks were flipping us off or screaming at us. Janay is a master textile artist who gives me courage to sew in a stream of consciousness way - we share a love of the zigzag.
Making the bling/tag was its own project.
Real tree.
Time passes, and the meaning of songs change. Mark wrote a song about Westwood years ago that means something to any person who is from there. Trying to reconcile his love of the land with the hardship of the place and its baggage. I used to think that he whined too much about his life, that he was being a drama queen. Later I realized that he was just a few years ahead of me in trying to come to terms with, or express how you identify with (or don't) the important places in your life. As time goes by, I am glad that we have a place that we know is home, and stories to share about it.
Long may you run, Brother Mark.
Upholstery scrap, fire hose, old cordura from camo duck hunting bag.
Hemp base, army surplus brass D-ring padded with scrap leather to keep lid clips from gouging drum. Fire hose cattails, and Japanese crane motif inkjet printed on raw canvas.
Cattails - Old waxed cotton tarp, fire hose, scrap leather, and ripstop poly/cotton from old cargo pants/uniform at my last job.
Binding the lid with army surplus webbing.
Finished product - front view.
Lid and side - olive strip on the right made from waxed cotton tarps that were the roof of Lauren Kennedy's family cabin for several decades.
Front view.
My aunt runs a business in Kansas City 'Asiatica' that repurposes vintage Japanese textiles. The crane is from a digital photo that I took of one of her old fabrics. We inkjet printed it onto some raw canvas and then steamed it to fix the dye.
Lid clip and cattail detail
Lid detail
Handle is scrap leather wrapped around hemp rope that used to tie the German Army duffel bag shut (thru these same grommets).