Aikido Weapon Bag

Last October Gaby enrolled in an Aikido club and she recently bought her own wooden weapons. I thought it would be fun instead of buying the standard black polyester weapon bag to make her a personalized weapon bag out of two of her old pairs of jeans. I confess - I am extremely proud how this bag came out!

The bag is intended for keeping and carrying three wooden weapons - jo, bokken and tanto:

I used the entire length of the first pair of jeans to make the case, cutting four straight rectangular pieces from the bottom of the legs up to the cutting for the pockets. The case is fully lined with cotton textile with reinforced denim bottom. For the lining I used remains from a piece of fabric for a table cloth I made a few years ago:

The case closes with adjustable cotton string:

The pocket and the pocket flap for the tanto are also lined with cotton. The embroidery comes from the second pair of jeans:

The only new material I bought - the strap. Gaby was insistent that she didn't want it to be adjustable, so I I discarded the metal rings I had bought for a simple strap adjustment system and just sewed the strap to the side pieces. She claims it's more comfortable this way.

The bottom is reinforced with additional layers of denim. I hope to get a few pictures of the bag in action, but until then - just these a few detail pictures I managed to snap before she took the bag and carried it away to the dojo.