I’ve started off 2024 by ignoring all my planned makes, frogging my current projects repeatedly, and breaking my purchase moratorium buying lots of new fabric as a birthday present for myself. The only “good” news is that my first make of the year has been a great learning experience and set a pretty high bar for my next project: I’ve made a backpack.

The pattern is the Making Backpack from my favourite bag designer, Anna Graham. The pack is designed to hold a 14 inch wide laptop so I used a lot of materials for it. I will list all the materials below but first I should mention how much I have learned about nylon webbing, mesh pockets and fold over elastic. I used all three of these for the first time in this project and, as per usual for me, most of what I learned about them came from making mistakes. I should note the mesh and foldover elastic are only there because I slightly altered the pattern to add a mesh laptop pocket in the inner back of the pack.

I normally only use cotton webbing for bag handles but I didn’t have enough cotton webbing of the right size to make the back straps so I had to fall back on what I could find at the time: nylon webbing from Spotlight. I followed Anna’s pattern instructions when inserting this and just zigzagged the strap ends thinking this would stop them fraying. It was completely pointless. I finished the bag and thought it looked great, right up until I put it on my back to check and one of the straps came away from the top of the pack:

So I unpicked the top of the pack and sewed that strap back in, adding a bit of extra zigzag to “strengthen” the seam and tried on the pack again. The other strap came away in exactly the same manner. At this point there was some cursing and sulking, followed by a lot of google searches and many hours watching YouTube videos about webbing, backpack construction and for reasons best known to google, dog agility trial videos. This is also the point where I decided, a week after my birthday, that I hadn’t bought myself a nice birthday present and should go directly to the fabric store and get whatever I wanted. And the next day, because I had already broken my “no buying new fabric” pledge I may as well go to two other fabric stores and get whatever I wanted from them too.

So the Year of Stash Projects lasted four months and one day before I succumbed and bought new fabric. Although this is a record non-purchasing streak for me it is far short of my goal so I will have to try again now and see if I can get to the end of the Year with only this one lapse in fabric purchasing. I am pleased to report that I am still in unbroken streak of over four months not purchasing any new yarn though! Fingers crossed I can hold onto this one…

Back to the backpack saga: luckily one of those stores I ransacked for fabric also had this fabulous rainbow webbing so I did manage to work up the motivation to unpick the pack top, including all the annoying extra zigzag, and remake the straps, this time much more professionally. Hopefully the friend I’ve made the pack for will not have any strap issues now!

Materials used for this make:

• Pattern - Making Backpack by Anna Graham, paper pattern purchased at Cutting Cloth
• Main fabric – Organic Cotton Dry Oilskin by Merchant and Mills, purchased at Fibresmith
• Lining fabric – Japanese cotton quilting fabric, purchased at Amitie
• Binding fabric (for binding all inner seams) – Cotton quilting fabric in yellow, purchased at Amitie
• Zipper tape – Voodoo Bag Hardware Size #5 White Zipper tape with Iridescent Rainbow Teeth, purchased at Heights Sewing Centre
• Zipper Pulls – Voodoo Bag Hardware Size #5 Flower-shaped pulls in Iridescent, purchased at Heights Sewing Centre
• Magnetic snap (for front outside slip pocket) – purchased from StudioMio in a pack some years ago
• Rivets (for front outside slip pocket) – Merchant and Mills 9mm rivets in silver, purchased at Fibresmith
• D-rings and Tri-glides (for back straps) – By Annie bag hardware purchased at Heights Sewing Centre
• Webbing – see story above for why I won’t be listing the white stuff but the 1.5 inch wide rainbow webbing was from Heights Sewing Centre
• Mesh for laptop pocket – By Annie Mesh Fabric in black, from Heights Sewing Centre
• Foldover elastic for mesh pocket top – By Annie foldover elastic in black, from Heights Sewing Centre
• Stabiliser – By Annie Soft and Stable foam stabiliser (used in front and back panels), bought at Bellarine Sewing Centre

My only change to the pattern, apart from repeatedly stuffing up the straps, was to add the mesh laptop pocket to the inner back and move the existing inner zip pocket to the inner front piece to make room for this. I chose to use the magnetic snap on the front outside slip pocket and to set the back straps into the lower back of the pack using the strap holder option.