This is something that has been covered before, but I hadn't seen anyone take this approach. If this has been posted before, I apologize. I wanted to build a bishop bag with mesh pockets that didn't involve any elastic. You also hate elastic? Good we're on the same page. It bunches up and I feel like I need eight hands to get the tension right. Can I do it? Yes, but I don't like it. So instead I built a bag that had little cord lock closures on the ends of the pocket. Fits a set of tree straps well, and I can tuck my coiled up whoopies into their respective ends of the pocket.
Basically all I did was sew some 1.9 oz ripstop in a channel to the ends of the mesh. The ripstop has a square hole in the middle that is bounded with bar tacks. The shockcord is run through the cordlock there and into the channel. The shock cord is stitched to the ends of the channel and to the stuff sack itself.
I think in future I will take a half and half approach. I liked the channel better than the tensioned elastic to create the right gathering of the mesh, but the bump of the shock cord was a bit of a pain to sew right, plus I'm not sure how durable it will be in the long run. In future, I think I'll just run some elastic through the channel and sew the tensioned elastic down to the ends so the mesh gathers, but there a) won't be exposed elastic to catch on things and b) the ripstop will protect the opening on the mesh as opposed to making the channel out of the mesh itself.
I'd love any critiques to help improve the design for anyone who wants to use it. They're too much work for me to make regularly, but I thought I'd share this with you DIYers.
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