Looking for the perfect bag.

Now that the honeymoon’s booked (hooray!), I’ve started to think about what I’ll need to take with me on our trip. We’ll be walking around the city all day, and we’ll be carrying heavy cameras, so I need a comfortable bag to fit everything into.

This is a bag that I have already – a Crumpler Sheep Scarer.
It was perfect for college, and for lugging my old laptop about. It’s also perfect for days out when I’m close to home and only packing the camera and not much else. Because of the triangular shape of the bag, once you’ve got the camera and a lens or two stashed in the bottom, you can’t fit anything else in the top without having to unpack it all to get the camera in and out. Not ideal.

This is my proper grown-up handbag – a Mulberry Bayswater.
I love it to bits, but it has two problems. One, if I’m wearing a jumper or a big winter coat, the straps are about an inch too short to fit over my shoulder, which means I have to carry it in my hand. If I’m using the camera a lot, I really need a bag that’s hands-free. Two, inside it’s just one great big enormous space, which makes it very easy to fill with heavy things, and I can never manage to find the thing I want because it’s always right down in one of the corners.

So, after a fruitless trip to the local shops, I did what any sensible person would do and had a look on Etsy for a new bag.

Browing the “backpacks” category was a bit daunting – it brought up 117 pages of bags that mostly weren’t backpacks at all. (I do hate it when people deliberately tag things incorrectly to get more views.) Thankfully, on just the third page, I spotted a familiar image and went to the Bohemian Cats store to have a look.

I’ve bought bags from Baba Studio before, for Christmas gifts, and I was delighted with the quality as well as the beautiful imagery.

This is one of their three-way messenger bags. They come in black or taupe as a base colour, and you can choose from a stunning array of images for the front flap. I particularly like the way you can convert this style from shoulder bag to messenger bag to rucksack with just the one strap. So clever!

But, at only a couple of inches wide this is quite a slim bag, and I wasn’t absolutely convinced that my camera would fit inside. I contacted Karen at Baba Studio on Facebook, and she suggested that the laptop bag might be a better choice.

And wow, I think she’s right.

There’s an Etsy store specifically for the laptop bags, which are kept in stock, or you can place an order for the design of your choice from the Baba Store. Again you can decide between black or taupe as a base colour, and there are more than twenty gorgeous images to choose from. The inside of the bag has been made with brilliant attention to detail. There’s a padded section for your laptop, of course, but there’s also a drawstring waterproof cover over the main body of the bag. There are two zipped pockets, one of which has sections for pens. This is very important, as I can almost never find a pen when I need one! All of the pockets are completely covered by the flap, which I think is held in place by magnets, making it all extra secure.

But it’s not a rucksack, which is what I thought I was looking for.

Now I just need to decide whether that matters… and which design to choose!