Wooden Bag

This project required us to create a hand held vessel that incorporates weaving techniques learnt from the previous project.

For this project, I was inspired by natural elements such as wood, and hemp ropes as I used rattan as a material for my previous project. These materials reminded me of traditional japanese crafting and I looked to Japanese joinery as a source of inspiration. The two adverbs I chose to describe my piece are “Wrap” and “Puncture”.

Japanese joinery is a specialised niche field where crafters and woodworkers test out different style of joinery designs to secure wood together without the use of additional adhesive or nails.

I was inspired to do similar styles but I didn’thave the skillset or tools available for complicated joinery, thus I stuck to mainly hand drills creating puncture elements.

These are my 4 study models.

I decided to work with mainly the first and second study model, as I liked the aesthetics of it.

I spent quite a fair bit of time on the square frame, and it gives the element of puncture, thus I decided to use it as the base of my bag.

I experimented with a puncture through of the small wooden dowel on the large wooden dowel but it didn’twork out well as it wasn’t tight. The aesthetics of the punctured wooden wasn’t very nice either.

I decided to use plywood as the sides of the bag, and puncture it with drills. This will give space for the hemp ropes to go through for the weaving on the side of the bag.

From there, I combined the weaving of the second model with the frame.

I decided to experiment with a different kind of weaving for the sides of the bag. I drilled halfway into the base frame to secure wooden dowels on the side of the bag.

After securing the hemp ropes on the two sides of the bag, I decided to tie strings onto the wooden dowels to create the flap of the bag. This gives the bag a different kind of texture.

I decided to use magnet to secure the flap of the bag. I wrapped the magnet with the hemp rope, and tied it to the flap. The other magnet, I secured it to the interior of the bag.

For the handles, I initially wanted to wrap the hemp rope around something to have a structure to the handle. I decided to use braiding of 5 of the hemp ropes, and twirling of both briads together to create the handle. I tie it to the back of the wooden side panel.