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Reporter plays with fire while trying out a job that's in the bag

Maine at Work: At Sea Bags, Ray Routhier learns the ropes of using recycled sails to make tote bags sold worldwide.

By Ray Routhier rrouthier@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

PORTLAND - I wish at some point in my life I had learned to handle a lighter better.

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Amy Geren, wholesale accounts manager for Sea Bags, explains to Ray Routhier how bags are made.

John Ewing/Staff Photographer

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THIS WEEK'S JOB

TITLE: Wholesale accounts manager, Sea Bags, on Custom House Wharf, Portland.

WORKER: Amy Geren, 39, of Gorham.

HOURS: Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. most weeks: Some weekend hours at boat shows.

SALARY: $10 to $20 an hour for most workers.

DUTIES: Managing hundreds of wholesale accounts, making sure stores and businesses get their orders of Sea Bags products -- totes and other bags made from recycled boat sails; also periodically does many of the jobs on the manufacturing end of the process, including cutting up sails, punching grommets into bags, burning rope, tying rope handles, and removing tiny leftover threads from bags.

SURPRISING FACTS: To a nonsailor, at least, it was surprising to find that most of the sails nowadays are synthetic, which means they stand up to weather better, both as a sail and a bag. It's also surprising that the Sea Bags folks take the time to remove the tiniest bits of thread ends sticking out of their bags, using a Bic lighter to burn them away cleanly.

PERKS: Discounts on the handmade bags (which can cost more than $200 for large totes); working on Portland's waterfront; meeting interesting people.

ABOUT THIS SERIES

MAINE AT WORK takes an interactive look at iconic, visible or just plain interesting jobs done by folks in Maine. Reporter Ray Routhier shadows a worker or workers, reports what he sees and tries his hand at some of the job's duties.

IF YOU'D LIKE to suggest a job to be explored in this feature, e-mail rrouthier@pressherald.com or call 791-6454.

I don't smoke, and I use matches to light my grill, so my lighter skills were just never developed, I guess. I did not think this was a problem until I found myself at Sea Bags on Custom House Wharf. The company makes tote bags from recycled sails and sells them around the world.

One of the first tasks I was given was to do a quality check on some bags being shipped out to a gift shop that day. First I was to take off the stickers used to track the bag as it was being made. No problem.

Then I was to straighten the rope handle -- one continuous piece of rope -- to make sure it was the same length on each side of the bag.

But then -- this being a small company where bags are handmade and attention to detail is crucial -- I was told to look for tiny ends of thread that might be sticking out of a seam or other places on the bag. Then I was to take a Bic lighter and gingerly burn the tiny thread end off. Not snip it off, but burn it off, cleanly.

Not giving it much thought, I found a thread, lit the lighter, and stuck the lighter down into the bag, trying not to burn the bag.

Instead, I burned my thumb.

Surprised, I turned to Amy Geren for help.

"Well, when I do it I try to keep my thumb out of the flame," said Geren, the company's wholesale accounts manager, who often does manufacturing work, like quality control and attaching handles or grommets. "I hold the bag up and keep the thread above the flame."

Oh. Makes sense.

But even when I did it that way, I had a tough time getting the lighter's flame to focus on the tiny thread long enough to burn it away without damaging the bag. At one point, I left a small black spot where the thread had been.

"That's OK, what we want to avoid is a big burn mark or a mark from smoke," Geren said.

Not feeling comfortable that I could do this job for long without setting a bag on fire, I asked Geren what else needed to be done that day.

Looking around the waterfront shop, I could see finished bags for sale displayed just feet from people sewing on sewing machines or assembling other parts of the bag. Some people were working on procuring more sails, from around the world or from local people willing to bring them in to be recycled. I could also see boxes of nearly finished bags awaiting shipment.

Geren told me there were some shipments of wine bags going out that all needed rope handles. The rope handles had to be attached using grommets, small metal rings that are punched right into the fabric of the bag.

I was surprised to find that the recycled sails Sea Bags uses are mostly synthetic. Not being a sailor, I had some notion that sails were all canvas or something. But one of the sails I saw being cut up for bags was made of Dacron. It holds up better to wind and weather, both as a sail and a bag.

Putting in grommets was something I could handle. First I put the bottom half and top half of the grommet in the two compartments of the grommet press, which looked sort of like an old water pump, with a long iron handle.

Then I took the slender wine bottle bags and found the seam. Geren told me to find a spot near the smoother side of the side seam, about halfway between the top of the bag and the first line of stitching. Then I placed the bag, at that spot, onto the press.

Geren told me to slowly lower the press to make sure I was at the spot I wanted. When I was, she told me to put all my weight on the handle to punch the grommet through the fabric. I did, and it did take all my weight for a clean punch.

My grommets looked good, I thought, but after doing about five my arms were a little tired and I asked Geren how many we might do. She said there were about 190 bags waiting for grommets.

"Sometimes we might do a thousand of these," she said.

The joys of making things by hand.

After two grommets were placed on bags, I tied a rope handle to each one. This was pretty easy. But later, Geren took me over to a workbench to cut some more rope for the handles, which was a little trickier, and hotter.

Geren told me that we would burn the lengths of rope, instead of cutting them. That makes a cleaner and neater rope end.

At the workbench there were marks on the table to measure out the rope handles for various bags, including the wine bags. There was an electric "hot knife" for cutting, big spools of rope, and little tree stump segments. Geren told me to hold the rope against the tree stump piece as I burned it, to avoid burning the bench.

"The knife gets very hot, and the rope does, too, so you don't want to be whipping it around after you cut it," Geren said.

She also cautioned me against leaving newly cut lengths of rope near each other because the hot ends might stick together. I found handling a hot knife was easier than a lighter, since there was no flame, just hot metal which was fairly easy to avoid.

One job I did not try was cutting sails into pieces for bags. I saw one sail, more than 30 feet long, laid out on the floor for cutter Mike Marks. He had already drawn lines in pencil to mark out the sizes of material needed that day for bags. The sail had numbers on it, a small star, and some see-through plastic windows. All would become part of bags.

Much of the sail material used for bags is plain, but Geren told me Sea Bags always attaches a star, or anchor, or some decorative emblem so that no bag is plain when sold.

What scared me most about Marks's job was not just that he had to cut the swaths perfectly so they would be the right size for bags. The scariest part was that he wore knee pads the size of bed pillows, with braces that ran to his feet. This was a job that could wear out someone's knees in a day.

Seeing those knee pads, I decided it would be easier to just learn how to use a lighter and go back to removing thread ends from those wine bags. 

Staff Writer Ray Routhier can be contacted at 791-6454 or at:

rrouthier@pressherald.com