First me-made backpack, sewn from 1000D cordura

[Jarmo K]

Hey!

I’ve been busy sewing my first backpack last weekend and it is finally completed. And I thought I’d share my process and result here

The pack is made from my own design, but I’ve taken a lot of ideas for the construction and materials from looking at how my Savotta Jääkäri XL rucksack is built. The design itself is heavily influenced by Varusteleka’s Särmä TST CP 15 combat pack. This tutorial was what originally gave me the confidence to try out making a backpack. There are a lot more steps and details to sew in a pack compared to my earlier projects, but the sewing itself is not actually very hard, you just need patience to do it step by step.

The pack is 4 major panels of fabric: the anterior, posterior, bottom, and a long intermediate panel that wraps around the perimeter of the anterior and posterior panels. The shoulder straps are detachable and I did not make new ones for this project since I already have detachable shoulder straps from before.

Here’s the finished pack seeing daylight for the first time on my commute today:

And here is the pack just after I finished it. It also compresses down to a smaller size quite well:

I will probably post more images of the process a bit later. I just wanted to get something posted because I have a tendency to start writing a whole book worth of documentation when I want to share a project :)

[Jarmo K]

Well, the images don’t seem to show up the way intended in the post…

Here’s a imgur dump instead in the mean time:

MYOG backpack

[Jerry Adams]

wow, that looks really good, professional looking

[Ratatosk]

Hyvää!

[Jarmo K]

I felt like doing some relaxing vector graphics work today, so here is a digital version (made with inkscape) of the design I used to make this pack. I’ve never used or seen professional sewing patterns, so I don’t really know what they look like, or if they are supposed to look some particular way. So this is just documented for myself the way I like to understand things.

Sewing pattern for MYOG backpack

It’s not obvious to me if I can put up a SVG or PDF vector file here, so the .png will have to make do. If anyone wants the original vector file I’m willing to share it. I just don’t have anywhere to upload it right now.

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