Sewing a Simple Backpack
I love backpacks! I own way too many. Yet I’m always disatisfied with the spacifics. Too many straps in places I don’t want them. A pocket that isn’t just right. A bunch of unnecessary features. So for years I’ve dreamed of making my own backpack. My dream backpack.
Thankfully there is a whole online community of people like me who actually do this! If you search for “make your own gear” or “myog” you too can go down this particilar rabbit hole. I recommend the myog community on reddit as they have a ton of information, patterns, suppliers, equipment, examples, etc. They also seem to be very helpful and supportive.
I’ve barely sewed anything before this. The biggest project I’ve done was some small covers for mediation blocks, and that took me 3 years to finish. But during the easter long weekend I decided to finally tackle a real myog project. I had some material I’d ordered last summer (70d nylon ripstock - look that up if you’re curious but materials are complicated and I’m not going into details here) and some nice light waterproof material someone had donated to the community fabric stash in the Makerspace (I still don’t know what it is, some form of nylon ripstock is my best guess).
The pattern I used is for a small backpack from a well loved website called Prickly Gorse Gear called the Summit 15
The whole thing took two half days plus a few hours.
Here is a very brief walk through.
Printing the pattern took two tries to figure out because apparently (and I am angry I didn’t know this) A4 and 8 1/2 x 11 are NOT the same size. Be warned. Then I had to tape the papers together and cut out all the pieces. This and cutting the fabric took most of the first day. It was surprisingly messy and it’s great podcast listening work.
On the second day I actually got to sewing. The straps were one of the hardest parts, so of course I did them first when I had the least experience. I made a terrible mess of these edges, but it all worked in the end. I just kind of went for it and there is a few parts I will need to go back and reinforce a little.
Looking back, I was really just winging everything from threading the machine, to getting the tension right, to going around corners. Even just sewing straight was new to me. If I re-did these now after just a few more hours experience I would do a much better job.
Attaching the straps to the back. I was planning on lining the bag with the orange material and didn’t realize I should have attached the lining to the outside pieces at this point. That caused some minor problems later.
You can see the puckering and uneven stitches as I learn to go around corners. Yes I could seam-rip them and start again, but I kind of like how messy it is. I do think I will go back to some of these and reinforce them later.
Sewing creates a huge mess. After each day I spent probably 30 minutes cleaning up.
Sewing the zipper and gusset was the hardest part, but actually once i got through this bit a lot of how sewing complicated patterns crystallized. Suddenly why you sew things inside out and how they will look when you flip them made sense. The geometry of the bag starts to make sense after awhile.
The front panel attached to the gusset! Looks like a bag now!
Some real bad puckering as I didn’t realize how much the inner liner would stretch as I sewed, and I wasn’t correcting for that as I went so it all ended up at the end. To make things worse, I was connecting the liner to the outer later as I was connecting the front panel to the gusset. I am not 100% sure, but I think I should have been joining the liners to the outer fabric before doing anything else to them.
Adding the back panel. Here is where you learn to go real slow.
And basically done! I just needed to close off the inner seams (which were a terrible mess) and attach the webbing from the bottom of the pack to the straps. Its a real bag!
Note that you can see on the left a strap where a bit of fabric got flipped as i was sewing around one of the tight corners. I will need to go back and fix this later. This was the first strap I did and it was a little overwealming going around that corner and I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have.
If you’re going to make a bad-ass bag you better also make a bad-ass patch for it! Thankfully we have a fancy new embroidery machine in the makerspace, so I threw together this design and after 2 prototypes had something pretty functional.
And here is the finished product!
This week I realized I wanted to make the dung ball into a globe, so I made a prototype of that and stitched it (in the uglyest way possible, but that was the point) onto a hat I had used previously to test out some patches that didn’t work.