Self-finishing Canvas Bag Product Review

I wish I could say I liked this bag and that it’s a worthy replacement for the long-gone Needlepoint of Back Bay canvas bags. But instead of taking a canvas bag and making it easy to finish for needlepoint, it looks as if the company made no real effort to create a bag that could be used.

The bag itself (I bought the medium size) is made of heavy canvas with canvas straps and gold feet. It’s made from unbleached canvas and has a lining. No information is included about cleaning, a problem for a white bag. There is a nicely finished hole in the front for the needlepoint with generous space around it. This hole is backed only by the loose lightweight lining and has no stiffness to it. To access this space, you need to open a zipper in the lining, making the space for needlepoint a little pocket.

Although brief finishing instructions are on the company’s website, none are included with the bag. It comes wrapped in plastic as it probably came from the factory. This leaves the buyer struggling to figure out what to do to finish the bag. I tried several times to figure out how to finish.

At last, I read the website and found that my needlepoint should slip inside the pocket. This brings up another, more significant problem. Often canvases this small, 2×6, don’t have a significant amount of unstitched canvas around the design. But the pocket requires you to have plenty of space so your project will fit into the area with the stitched portion showing in the window. Otherwise, the needlepoint will disappear into the bottom of the pocket.

Now the needlepoint shows, but how to keep it secure? With the loose lining, there is lots of space. The company suggests you fold the edges to the back, but unless you have created your own project with generous margins, the needlepoint will slip as mine did from just sitting. Perhaps a solution would be to attach the needlepoint securely to cardboard to fit the pocket. Now we are getting away from easy to finish.

I finished my bag with a piece cut from an unfinished project. Then I left it in my office for a couple of weeks, because I did not need it. Picking it up over the weekend, I found the needlepoint was no longer smooth and flat in the pocket and that the zipper pull for this pocket had fallen off — all this without using it.

Clearly it’s a bag that needs some tweakiing.