Sedona Tote Bag

A blanket pattern does not bend itself around a bag. These bands just keep going (straight down the face, over the side, out of the frame), and the bag gets built around them.

Mustard and amber take the widest room, with burnt rust beside them and a deep brick red narrower than either, doing the darkening. A dark olive and a smoky denim blue come in to cool the whole run down; a warm brown weights it. In places a tight fence of cream lines goes in between two wide bands, ruled down each side in near-black; elsewhere one colour simply runs into the next.

Not every band is printed the same way

Look closely and three of them are combed with fine crossways ticks, the way a thread lies when it has been beaten down tight: the denim blue, the brown and the deep red. The mustard, the rust and the olive are laid down smooth. Nobody builds that difference in by accident, and it is the whole reason a flat print does not read as flat.

What you notice, and when

1. The width rhythm first: wide, wide, a stack of hairlines, wide again. It reads from across a room before any single colour does.
2. Then the cool bands: the blue and the olive are what stop a run of warm colours from turning into one orange blur.
3. Then the ticking: close up, and only close up, which is a good thing to have on something you look at every day.

The straps are black webbing, flat as a seatbelt. Out of the seam at one top corner comes a short run of dark teeth (it is a zip) with a pale flat pull tape hanging off the end of it, and the top closes on it. Both faces carry the same field of bands, so there is no wrong way round, and the bands run on over the side panel rather than stopping at the edge.

Nothing is printed until the order is in. Five to ten working days to make. So this one is never gone when you come back for it, and the panel that arrives was cut for you rather than pulled off a pile.