Tour de Pants
(There's really no reason to call this entry "Tour de Pants." I mean, it does deal with biking and and it does mention the peloton, but I only thought of pants because peloton reminds me of pantalon, and, well, there's this place in France . . .)

About two months ago we were riding our bikes to a byo restaurant and I carried wine in a bag I had made, slung over my shoulder. My mind is still blown by bike riding. It feels just as liberating now as it did when I was 7 and the only way I had to get anywhere quickly on my own. I started riding regularly only this summer, but a day I can't ride to work is a day that sucks. I mean, I ride a 40-year-old three-speed, I'm not in particularly good shape, and the only people I pass tend to be homeless-seeming people tooling around apparently aimlessly, but still, I frequently fantasize I'm in some sort of peloton of one.

But the bag I was carrying that night wasn't ideal for wine, and as we were riding to the restaurant (Bite; riding side by side in the cool wind on quiet dark summer side streets) I was thinking about creating a messenger-type bag specifically for carrying wine while riding bikes to byo restaurants or parties. I found in Lotta Jansdotter's excellent book Simple Sewing a pattern for a bag for a yoga mat:



I used the basic yoga bag pattern, but changed the proportions and a few other things to make it into a wine bag. My first attempt worked fairly well (though I haven't made photos of it yet). I used fabric from a vintage kimono in a weird sort of Miro-ish pattern, but the proportions were somewhat off. My next one, which I brought as a gift to friends we stayed with in Philadelphia, was pretty successful, and I used the same kimono fabric. My third iteration of the bag was my first project using leather. I was going for mod, but given my general impatience and my inexperience with leather, it came out more rough-hewn, so I've sort of tried to convince myself that rough-hewn was, in fact, what I had been going for all along.




I think the proportions of this one are about right. I like the way I attached the strap to the bag and the D-ring to the strap as well as the little pocket I made for the wine key:



It also fits two bottles of beer (and probably two Soda-Club bottles), but it's too narrow for a standard Nalgene bottle. More bags to come, maybe: I'm thinkng about a double-barrelled bag and one that could somehow carry a six-pack, but that would probably involve a different paradigm.