A Journey to Bag Land

In Bag Land, there is no purpose that can't be satisfied with a bag of the right shape and size.

In Bag Land, a bag can be utilitarian and beautiful or beautiful and utilitarian. There are no other choices.

I bring this up because I've had a recent experience with the bag in the photograph. I made it last year as part of the inventory I created as part of my book, Gifting Green. I also toted it and others like it to a crafts fair from which most of them were toted home again.

(There are lessons here that come under the heading: I'm glad I did this once so I know how not to do it again.)

The snowflake motif you see on the side is a piece of wired ribbon that came on a gift given to my husband and I by our son's then-girlfriend. I stitched it on a piece of white-on-white fabric before fashioning the rest of the bag.

I made only three of these because that was all the ribbon I had.

Last October, when my youngest brother Dave and my sister-in-law Martha were here, I pulled out some of my bag inventory to give to her. Martha gravitated to this bag immediately.

When she and Dave returned to the Cape to see Martha's Mom before leaving for home, Martha took out the bags and showed them to her Mom—who fell in love with this one.

Martha's Mom, Brenda, is a supporter of the Thornton Burgess Museum in Sandwich on the Cape. (Burgess wrote a number of children's books collected as the Mother West Wind stories.) The museum was having a silent auction as a fundraiser. Brenda donated this bag—which went on to receive one of the highest bids in the auction. Brenda reports that people just loved it.

There are a couple of lessons here. One is that stories can and do develop from events that go almost unnoticed at the time. Second, that setting has a lot to do with the value folks place on an object. In the crafts fair, this little number went all but unnoticed. At a museum's silent auction, it was prized.

It's part and parcel of understanding who your audience really is and the willingness to experiment to find it.