Wooden Bag Handles

These deceptively simple looking items start life as a pile of 4/4 rough hardwood boards and go through a number of milling steps to shape them, then are sanded and finished.  To start with the rough planks are cross-cut to 4 or 5 feet in length to make them easier to handle, ripped to 6 inches wide and resawn to make two approximately 1/2 inch thick billets.

The billets are then surface planed on both sides to make them smooth and reduce their thickness to the required 3/8".  Then templates are attached to the billets with screws, but we are careful to place the screws in the area that will be cut away when we make the slot later on so the screws do not mar the handles.

A band saw is used to rough cut around the templates reducing the billets to individual pieces.  We leave about 1/8" of wood beyond our cut line.  The hole in the handle is roughed out using a Forstner bit in a drill press.  Now the pieces are ready for final shaping.

Final shaping requires three passes through the router table.  The first uses an expensive solid carbide spiral pilot bit to trim the handles to the exact shape of the template.  A bearing on the router bit rides along the template and trims away all remaining waste on the handle blank.  Then, the templates are removed and the router set up with a round-over bit to ease the edges on one face of each handle.  The third step requires a jig attached to the router table to cut a slot in the precise location and length needed.

Now we get to the really tedious part.  Sanding!  At first we hand sanded these handles because the complex shape and delicate curves makes most power sanding tools inappropriate.  This took a long time and left our hands aching at the end of the day.  Then we discovered the Star Sander.  It cuts sanding time in half and is much easier on us physically, but the heads are expensive and don't last long.

The final step is finishing.  When we are making a batch for In The Bag, they want the handles finished in Antique Oil.  For this we apply three coats of hand rubbed antique oil finish.  Each coat requires 24 hours to catalyze before it is scuff sanded to smooth it.  After the third coat is hard, the batch is packed securely into a box and sent off to Los Angeles where our clients will have the bags attached to produce their product.  For on-hand stock the handles are finished with 3 coats of semi-gloss lacquer.  This produces a nice smooth finish with much less work, finishing a batch can normally be accomplished in one day.

Ros Wyatt and Binni Hackett are English sisters-in-law who both now live in America. Ros lives in Berkeley, California and Binni lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Binni and Ros are both knitters who foresaw a surge in knitting popularity. Recognizing a need for contemporary, stylish, and hip bags to tote around knitting gear, they designed a bag that is functional and exceptionally chic.

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