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My life is not just spent in front of my sewing machine and this screen. Most of the hours of any given week are taken up selling wine at a boutique wine-only store. Not only does it afford me the pleasures of having a “day job” and therefore funding — barely — my design habit, I get to be a part of and representative of the wine world. Most of my sales are made through suggestions because we don’t sell Yellow Tail or Ecco Domani or just about anything else you’ve heard of. I have to explain a lot to the customers, but I think, in the end, they learn more about the wines they buy than they would if they went straight for a familiar label. I really like the part of my job that lets me engage with people about wine. It’s fun to talk about wines, to make fun of wine culture, to share drinking experiences. The best part, though, is the mental feasts I dine on throughout the evening. One of the easiest ways to make a suggestion for someone is to find out with the wine will be paired with. That simple question produces answers ranging from spaghetti & Paul Newman sauce to pan seared Copper River salmon with a sesame seed crust & a salad of microgreens with an orange and balsamic vinaigrette. The flashes of imagery my mind makes after these descriptions are better than eating any meal. For that moment, the dish is perfectly cooked with tendrils of steam rising from the plate and it’s all perfectly lit at a beautiful table, just like those shitty soft-focus pictures that food magazines are filled with. I summon the taste center of my brain for an wine accompaniment and then, mentally, the flavors highlight each others’ strengths and downplay their weaknesses perfectly. It is a moment of (food) perfection that I rarely experience in real life, but that mirrors the pleasures of designing. Design is trying to achieve the same moments of being. I see the bags as I’m designing them perfectly lit, functioning perfectly and practically. I guess those moments of, albeit fantastic, perfection create the momentum to power through the very imperfect reality of creating the meal, the bag, the days. I have to see the reality of all of my bags, but all of those meals wait in stasis, never to be loudly chewed, never to be thrown out or cleaned up after. If only that was a world more available to us everyday.