I hate sewing circular seams
My last handlebar bag has a few things wrong with the strap placement, so I’m sewing up a new one to take its place while I bring it back to the shop to relocate the straps. This means that I need to sew up a bag much like it. Which means it needs to be cylindrical.
Now, the spiffy new 50+ year old Pfaff sewing machine just loves to sew packcloth and nylon webbing; the machine sewing of this thing took me about 25 minutes, even including ripping out a couple of seams and realigning the zipper. But that doesn’t include the approximately 4 hours I needed to actually get the cap pieces ready for sewing.
I first tried to machine sew an end cap freehand. This would have worked except for the barrel of the bag folded up under the foot of the machine. So I ripped that seam out, pinned the cap into place, and tried again. And the barrel of the bag folded up again.
So I ripped the seam again, then used a roll of duct tape (which, by happy coincidence, was almost exactly the 5" diameter of the bag) as a mandrel to fit the bag around, carefully pinned the cap, and s-l-o-w-l-y sewed it on the machine.
Which folded the barrel of the bag under the foot. Again.
sigh
So what I did was (after throwing out the end cap I had been trying to sew in, because the last time I ripped out the seam I managed to tear the fabric) to pin the caps into place, then tack them into place by hand, and then finally fed them into the Pfaff for the final 90 seconds or so of machine sewing.
I HATE sewing circular seams. I’ll stick to boxy bags for a while, because I can machine sew them without having to spend several hours preparing the carcass beforehand.