Tag: a life in objects

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The Bag of Theseus

A saturated photo of Lucy on a green hillside on a sunny day. She's lying on the grass reading a book, a small orange backpack on the turf next to her.

The bag in this photo is now old enough to drive.

I got it sometime early in high school, probably from the outdoor shop Riley’s mom managed down in Ventura. I eschewed carrying any kind of purse for years because I like keeping my arms and hands free to scramble about, and this little pack was a dream come true for that purpose. It’s just the right size to hold all my essential belongings: a water bottle, a sketchbook, my pens, snacks, a book, even (these days, when necessary) an iPad.1

It’s been down the Grand Canyon and across the Pacific Ocean, to conventions and signings, through endless TSA checkpoints, and to the Edinburgh hillside in this photo, where I passed a blissful and sunny afternoon in 2007.

But last week I came home to find the front panel shredded open thanks to the escalating Rodent Situation here at Bellwood Towers. I was heartbroken. Patagonia have a repair program where they’ll do their best to fix anything that’s gone wrong with their stuff for free (pretty cool!), but the wait times right now are long, and I couldn’t really imagine being without this thing for months on end. I could patch these little rodent holes myself—they’re not huge, after all—but the truth is, the bag’s seen better days.

The elastic is shot. The zipper pulls all broke off long ago. The inner lining is dingy and stained because I’ve never learned my lesson about which pens can and can’t survive air travel. The waist straps are missing because I cut them off to make a belt for my dad when we’d evacuated from the Thomas Fire and his trousers kept falling down.

And so I thought “What’s the harm in looking?” and opened eBay.

As you might expect for an item released in 2005: not a lot of options. Some from the same line, but inevitably in a larger size, and all of them black. The only similarly small one was $115. From Japan! Excessive. Unreasonable. I gave up.

And then the following morning I checked again. A bag! My bag! The same color (well, the color I guess my bag must’ve been once upon a time, though I’d never think it to look at them side by side), thirty bucks, shipping from Texas. Too good to be true.

I hit the button.

Two small Patagonia backpacks side by side. They're identical, but the one on the left is faded to a light brown with tears across the front. The one on the right is newer-looking, vibrant orange.

When I was working on A Life in Objects (my first 100 Day Project, back in 2016) it became very clear to me that I love long-term belongings. Partly it’s because I grew up in a very thrifty household and the idea of randomly replacing or upgrading things willy-nilly is blasphemy to Bellwood ears. But it’s also because I love the stories that trail behind oft-used and much-loved items. And yet: a huge benefit of that project was giving myself permission to let some of the profiled objects go after feeling like I’d preserved them for posterity in some small way.

In fact, I’m pretty sure I drew this backpack. Oh yeah, here it is: Day 52.

A black and white illustration of a small backpack with written text. It says "Day 52: doing the math, I think I've had this little orange patagonia daypack for more than a decade(!!!). I've never been good at carrying a purse—I want a waterbottle, snacks, a sketchbook, something to read, and a mess of pens with me at all times. I also prefer to keep my hands free. This trusty companion has held all that and more on boats and buses, in forgein countries and throughout the greater Portland area. I love it dearly, like a limb. To be utterly self-sufficient, that's a precious feeling."

I guess my feelings about it haven’t really changed.

Anyway, I’m blogging about a tiny, ancient backpack because I want to give myself permission to take its replacement with me on my next adventure: a flight tomorrow morning, my first since February of 2020. I’m sure I’ll be twitchy and anxious under my double-masked exterior, trusting in two shots of vaccine to carry me across the country and back without incident, but I think there will also be a lot to appreciate. A lot to wonder at. I feel rusty, but renewed by this long break from going anywhere.

Tiny miracles. Old things made new again.

1. Hell, when I first got this bag the iPad hadn’t even been released. I didn’t own a cell phone. Different times. ↩

News

New Collection: A Life in Objects

A little promotional chat this week: I’ve got a new box set collection available in my store!

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If you recall I tried my hand at participating in The 100 Day Project this year, drawing a thing a day every day for 100 consecutive days from April to July. I documented a bunch of meaningful objects in my life, complete with context—a miniature museum of personal history.

Here are all the finished entries in one big sheet:

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Once the illustrations were done, I wanted to bring them into one location at the same size they were drawn, so I contacted some printing friends of mine at Eberhardt Press and Twin Ravens Press to create sets of pocket-sized replica notebooks and a handsome, gold-foil slipcase to hold them in. Here’s my original mockup of the booklets, with a die-cut cover:

 

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Once I’d figured out the basic format, I went hunting for the right kinds of endpapers. Kristin at Twin Ravens had sold me on the idea of doing gold foil on the boxes, so I wanted something to match:

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BINGO.

A lot of frenetic proofing and printing and cutting and folding later, we ended up with boxes that could be cut out and assembled without any glue! And a lot of handsome booklets to go inside them.

Then my life became a long chain of assembly line time (500 box sets is a lot of box sets). I folded boxes at home, at the studio, at coffee shops, behind my table at SPX, and on planes:

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A couple weeks of that yielded shippable box sets that winged their way to folks around the globe, which is my absolute favorite part of the process.

Here’s a little video walkthrough of the final result:

I’m so excited to have these new beauties out in the world. If you’d like one for yourself, they’re available exclusively through my store right now. Enjoy!