Amateur Bard

Many eons ago, I bought a knock off of an Innocent World violin bag. I had only a passing interest in EGL fashion, but I am a sucker for violin novelty items, okay? Even though it was a knock off, it was still pretty damn expensive for a bag so I really babied it and didn’t use it for every day use, much less wagging it around at dirty ren faires and crowded comic conventions. Also, it was made out of pleather so it finally Succumbed and started flaking everywhere. Boo. I needed a new, hardy violin themed bag that I could wag around as my BG3 bard.

(I whipped up the original version in about a week/week and a half so I didn’t take many photos. Oops!)

I used the templates and measurements from the Making the Violin website to draw up pattern pieces.

The fabric for the body and scroll is regular old quilting cotton than I dyed using RIT. (It is, in fact, as awful as I remember, but I was really desperate to dye some wool quickly, so I threw in some cotton to soak up the “excess” aka the non-acid component of RIT.) I didn’t have any black cotton to hand that I wanted to sacrifice, so I used dark brown to mimic a rosewood look for the fingerboard and miscellaneous fittings. I made a stencil out of freezer paper for the f-holes. I had a little blow out on the treble f-hole but I just… used some brown fabric paint to cover it up later.

The body pieces have heavy sew-in interfacing sandwiched between the fashion fabric and a muslin lining. I stitched in purfling lines with black embroidery floss and a shaky hand. The front and back were whip stitched to the “ribs.” My original plan was to line this bag, and I had planned to include the stiffening for the ribs in the lining for… reasons that made sense at the time that completely allude me now. I was running short on time for my 2024 Bristol trip, so I ended up skipping the lining in favor of stitching in the zipper 😛

Despite the floppiness from the lack of stiffening, I was so pleased with how the bag turned out. I used an old belt for the strap; the scroll is tacked on to the strap. At the other end, I stitched on the strap and finished it off with a thread button for the end pin.

This past spring, I got around to putting in the lining and missing stiffening pieces. I love this funky rainbow batik, which was the single newly-bought material for the whole project. (That’s less of a flex and more of an indictment of my stash…)

And if you’re wondering, it does work pretty well as a bag! I stash things that I don’t need immediately to hand, like medications and a small notebook, in the ‘lower bouts’, then my wallet fits snugly in the waist, and finally my phone and hand sanitizer are easily accessible in the ‘upper bouts’.

Honestly, I love this bag so much that I picked out my next three costume projects specifically so I can use the violin bag “in character” (an AU version of Rabbit, Johann from the Adventure Zone Balance, and a late 1600s violinist)