The original name for this bag was the Four Towers Bag - a play on my love for Lord of the Rings. If you look at each outer face on the bag (front, back, left, right) you can see that all of the panels tower in at the top. I decided to keep this theme when going in to do the update.

Updating the pattern wasn’t too complicated. I wanted to extend the main compartment zipper past the top as I found with other bags I had, it was nice having the extra room at the opening. I curved the bottom corners of the front/back panel and that was pretty well it for pattern updates.

The interior mesh pockets came with sewing up a prototype. I didn’t have any rivets to secure the webbing handles so decided to use snaps instead. That got me thinking, since I already had two snaps at the top of each side, might as well add in a couple more at the bottom then I could have something snap to them from the inside. I jumped back into the pattern and made a couple of pieces for the inside and the mesh pouches were born.

What was once four towers, became six with the two added interior pouches. This is the Frankenstein Duffle because of the leather scraps but as I write this post out, I’ve decided any regular version will be called the Roku Tower Duffle Bag.

“Roku” in Japanese means six, also the name of an awesome gin. Maybe one day we could do a collab or something…