Normally I review props and the like, but there’s a new company that’s started up with a really unique niche. It’s the brainchild of Kassandra Morrison, who’s a super talented hooper and juggler and she’s started a company producing travel bags for props.

So, for most of my prop spinning career, I’ve had it pretty easy because poi will fit into anything. Now that I’ve added double staves to my repertoire it’s made travel a little bit more challenging. For a long time, I was using an old camp chair bag to lug my staves around and it was far from ideal. It tore and had to be repatched all the time.

For a long time, I’d actually thought myself of asking a friend who was handy with a sewing machine to help me make a better bag to lug my staves around with. Kassandra beat me to the punch, however!

So I’m going to start out by saying that her bags are freaking awesome, but I want to give you more detail on this because not only are they amazing, Kassandra totally took a bunch of feedback I gave her and made the bags even better. At least for my purposes.

Let’s talk basics first, shall we? Each of her bags is made of a really durable canvas with these lovely velcro pouches on the outside. The inside has a soft lining and there’s both a shoulder strap as well as a briefcase style handle on the outside. I usually sling the bag over my shoulder and it gives me easy access to the outside pouches as well as a really convenient way to carry the staves.

As a really beautiful and personal touch, Kassandra also ships her products in a really beautiful little package that includes a thank you note and a bow. It’s things like this that really reinforce how much she cares about you as a customer and makes you feel really valued.

Now, in and of itself the bags are beautiful and super durable, but I talked Kassandra into making a couple modifications that take them from being beautiful and useful to absolutely indispensible.

First, the shoulder strap was originally sewn straight to the side of the bag and i created some really awkward pinch points. That joint has been replaced with a clip on a bearing so now the strap can move with you and can even be removed entirely if you prefer.

But the more awesome part is the inside pocket. See, the first bag I got had a small pocket on the inside, but I quickly noticed that when I carried around both my fire staves as well as my practice staves that I’d get soot all over both the inside of the bag as well as my practice staves. I asked Kassandra to make an internal compartment specifically for fire tools to keep them from getting soot all over and she totally delivered on it.

There’s now this lovely pocket that’s the full length of the bag that gets covered but a velcro flap to separate fire tools and keep them apart from your other staves.

To be honest, this takes care of pretty much all my prop needs right now. I can stuff my poi into the inside and outside pockets while my staves fit comfortably inside and I can even make sure I’ve always got my fire staves on me. I’ve used this bag extensively now traveling to FLAME and Monkey See Monkey Do and it’s an absolute trooper.

I’m using the small bag which is intended for levi wands because my staves tend to be short--no longer than 32 inches at most. That said, the bag is still super roomy. I can fit at least six pairs of staves in here including my fire staves without feeling as though the bag is too difficult to close or that I’m putting too much pressure on the zipper. Kassandra makes bigger bags for biggers staves that have much more room in them, too.

My one and only quibble at this point is that the bag is currently set up so that if you want easy access to the outside pockets, it has to be hung from the right shoulder to the left hip. That means that the pockets are accessible to your left hand. I happen to be right-handed. It’d be nice to have the choice between the two sides, but to be perfectly honest I completely forgot about this issue after using the bag for several weeks. I totally adapted to it.

So, overall I’m giving Modek Designs and more specifically their prop bags two massive thumbs up. This is a product I’ve wanted now for years and Kassandra totally delivered a winner with it. I’m happily endorsing these, so if you’d like to pick one up for yourself, you can go to the Modek Designs Etsy Shop and use the promo code “DREXFACTOR” to get a small discount on your order. It also tells Kassandra that I sent you.

Thanks for the amazing bag, Kassandra! It’s getting a lot of use already and will likely get a whole lot more in the coming years.