Walkabout Mark IV Details posted

I’ve just posted details on the “Mark IV”, the latest revision to the Walkabout walking bag design.

New Stock Available

If you’ve been following my Twitter feed, Facebook page, flickr stream, or RSS feed, you’ll be aware that I’ve been working on sewing up some stock bags. I’ve been getting a lot of inquiries as to when those will be available (and what will be available), so here’s the skinny.

UPDATE: Go get ‘em!

Late Fall Update

No, that photo doesn’t have anything to do with the update, other than it was taken in the Fall, and I like it.

Hi! Wow, check that out, a blog post. Yes, Zugster Bags is still in existence, and I am back at the sewing machine. When I last posted about putting the order queue for custom bags on hold, I had intended to go straight into building a batch of stock bags, but you know what they say about intentions. That turned into a more extended hiatus while I recharged my mental batteries on the sewing front. I’ve been thinking a lot about design in the interim, and I also used the time to stress test a couple of prototypes in daily use.

Read on for more…

A few changes

I’ve decided to make some changes in the way obtaining Zugster bags works. Up until now I’ve been taking names down on a waiting list/build queue. And if everyone on the list followed through with an order, at the present rate it would take me somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5 years to work through that list.
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So, effectively immediately I’ll be finishing up the few custom orders that are currently in progress, and then I’ll be putting the custom-ordered Zugster queue on hold indefinitely.

Click through for more details.

The Year in Statistics

I thought it would be interesting to look back at 2009 and count up what I produced under the banner of this tiny business called Zugster. Here are the counts of all the bags I made in 2009, both stock and custom ordered. Its’s possible I missed one or two in this count, but not many.

Shifting Priorities (regarding embroidery)

I’ve decided that I will no longer offer applique’d and embroidered artwork as an option on my bags, effective immediately. The reasons for this are multiple, but the primary one is time. Zugster Bags is a part-time operation, and the artwork takes a lot of time, both to accomplish on a day to day basis, and to become really good at. What it comes down to is that I’d rather spend that time designing new bags and experimenting with new materials, not making the same thing over with different artwork – that part’s just not interesting to me. So other than a couple of orders currently in progress, no more. Anything that’s doable with a straight-stitch is still on the table – stripes and multi-color flaps, for example.

For anyone whom this disappoints, I apologize. I highly recommend Under the Weather, RELoad, Seagull Bags, and PAC as folks who can do a far better job than I could at turning anything you can imagine into high quality flap artwork.