Many of my best ideas arrive fully formed, which never fails to astonish me. As much as I might wrestle through other things, or gather ideas to cobble together in a garment, my favorite and most successful items seem to be the product of some kind of spiritual divination. In the case of the Raven Bag, I knew that I wanted to design a crossbody purse using Berroco Lustra, an intriguing merino and Tencel blend that I actually prefer felted. The shiny plant fiber is trapped by the quickly felting wool, and the loopy outcome resembles a luxurious, subdued bouclé.

Crossbody bags were a bit of a revelation to me. I like to joke that I
could be stranded with one of my overstuffed totes and be able to survive off of the contents for a week, but when I bought my first tiny bag, I felt liberated. Edited down to the bare essentials, my entire body felt freed from the burden of schlepping around unnecessary provisions. The avian shape and one-piece construction method of the Raven Bag dawned on me at the tail end of a Seattle winter while I was immersed in Nordic culture, in particular, Odin’s iconic ravens Huginn and Muninn. These anthropomorphised stand-ins for “thought” and “memory” are gorgeous reminders of a culture and history that I find endlessly inspiring.