Category: Experiments

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The Burrito Pack

This one is for the Instagram community after I just hit 1000 followers. There is no small victory 💪 and these little steps matter to makers like myself. I don’t build bags nor do I document my work for money, I do it for the community that supports me. Now, what could I do to thank you all? I decided that I would make the ultimate pack.

After a lot of drawings, and a lot of thinking, and a lot of coffee to stay awake, I decided that this special pack would solve the single most annoying problem with ultralight packs. I mean, we’ve all been there, you have that one piece of gear that you know is inside your bag. You know you packed it, but you can’t ever take it out without emptying the entire bag, because this one puny piece of equipment always finds its way to the bottom of the pack. Well, I fixed this once of for all. I present to you… the Burrito pack!

The perfect pack. Nothing more, nothing less.

Bam! There you have it! That puny piece of gear no longer has a bottom to fall to! The Burrito pack opens from the top and bottom with not one but two roll… tops? No, sorry, with a roll-top and a roll-bottom . And since it’s a special build for a special occasion, I thought I’d etch that “1000” on its side.

Roll-bottom forever baby. I can retire now. Oh, you’re still here? Ah you must be wondering what that gorgeous fabric is huh? I knew you would ask. I’ll give you a hint…

There won’t be any behind the scene for this pack, I need to keep this a secret.

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A Pack for Practice

There is never a good reason not to make something. But the truth is, sometimes one simply does not have enough time to spend making. Well, these are times when you might just need to take a step back and think. So I did, and figured if I only had 2 hours in front of me, I could still pull a rabbit out of the bag, or a bag out of the rabbit. So I brewed myself a cup of coffee, grabbed what was lying around the workshop and just went for it.

I ended up building the Graffiti pack out of only 2 panels, each one 60cm height and 30 cm wide which makes for a relatively small pack of about 10 liters when assembled. I had a sample of printed polyester canvas waiting for such on occasion but felt like the pattern would be just a tad too much, so I added a plain black front zipper pocket to break the pattern and dial it down a notch.

The rest of the pack did not take long to finish after that. The shoulder straps were put together with some simple webbing and ladder lock buckles.

I added some scrap webbing to reinforce the roll-top and then sewed the two panels together with straight stretch stitch. The canvas itself was fraying quite a bit, so I blind hem stitched it for good measure. Unfortunately, when one works in a hurry, one sometimes gets some nice spaghetti stitching to show for. It does not usually impact the stitch strength or the function of the pack, but it sure makes a maker feel bad about it. Oh well, that’s life.

And there you have it, a simple pack that can make Misses ABC happy. All done under 120 minutes.

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Upcycling an Ikea Frakta bag is the perfect challenge for you!

In the same vain as the Cotton experiments, I thought I’d also expend the fabric tryouts to the good’ol Ikea Frakta bag, which costs a literal 1€. What started as a joke ended up being the real deal: A friend of mine and fellow maker/hiker challenged me to make a decent looking bag with just one single Frakta bag.

FRAKTA Shopping bag, large, blue, 21 ¾x14 ½x13 ¾ "/19 gallon
That’s an Ikea Frakta bag

Since the challenge was still to build something nice, we also agreed that we could use small recycled bits and pieces and small components, as long as we can keep the overall cost of the material below a few euros. I settled on adding some recycled webbing in a couple of places, and use a scarp piece of light Cordura to reinforce the bottom just for convenience.

In the end, I re-used a few things from previous prototypes and deceased bags to make sure I keep the “bill of material” cost under the price of coffee on the French Riviera. ☕ In the end, it came down to a relatively short and definitely cheap material list.

ItemQuantityPrice (total)
Ikea Frakta shopping bag10.99€
Upcycled 10mm Polyester webbing50cm0€
Remant 15mm Strong Polyester webbing60cm1€
Reused Lineloc tensioners20€
12mm D-Rings (0.30€ each)20.60€
Reused 3mm Cord1m0€
Scrap Uncoated Cordura0.04m²0€
Scrap Hook & Loop Tape (Velcro)25cm0€
Grand Total:2.59€
Call me cheap, but it’s worth every penny.

Now that I am done with it, I think this is a fantastic challenge. Every pack maker should try this at least once no matter how long they’ve been making things for. It forces you practice a couple of important steps in pack making:

  • Properly rip the seams of the Frakta to avoid loosing precious material
  • Work around resource limitations.
  • Recycle stuff you’ve been piling up.
  • Optimize the design to into a small canvas.
  • Think about the stitch type and size based on the canvas properties.
  • Align a patterned canvas parts properly (to avoid crooked looks)

I wouldn’t spoil the the final result just yet since I will upload a few pictures of the final pack in no time, but suffice to say, it looks great ! Better than I thought even!

Spoiler alert!

Stay tuned…

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Let’s use some Cotton Canvas for once

So after spending the last years building packs with mostly mid to high-end technical fabrics, I figured I should try something else. Plus, I’ve received so many requests for creating and selling less-technical packs – mostly city day packs or business packs – that I figured I should give that a try. If that’s a success, the next step would be finding nice printed cotton fabrics to make more of these. Ethically sourced would be great, but it’s hard to find in such low quantities!

So I settled for some cheap heavy-duty 100% cotton canvas, usually used for outdoor tents (garden variety tents) weighing at 350g/sqm. We’re far from the ultralight category, but that’s the whole point.

A few custom designs in the same vain.

Working with this super inexpensive cotton canvas is fantastic for prototyping on the cheap. I really like the feel of the end product, and I haven’t even spent much efforts making it look nice. The third attempt is by far the nicest finish as it is fully lined with the same canvas as the outside, and a dedicate 13″ laptop ‘pocket’.

And the third attempt looks decent.

One of my goals was using the absolute minimum count of raw materials, that is, find as much use for a single material as possible, so that these are easy to source, and cheaper to order because of the ‘higher’ volume. So I use the same canvas for making a bunch of the straps, lining, pockets, loops etc… I did use a nicer 30 mm cotton webbing for the satchels’ straps because I liked it, but I could use the canvas for that as well, like I did for the day pack. Apart from that, some metal D-rings and some fancier aluminum buckles which could be simple D-rings if need be.

One huge take-away from using a woven canvas is how much it frays compared to coated canvas or laminated fabrics. So much so that, so far, there would have been no way not to keep the edges bound without hemming them. I’ve used both folded grosgrain ribbon or a more simple blind hem stitch to that end.

On the plus side, building one of these models is a lot less time-consuming, as the complexity is probably half of what I usually build. Last but not least, I found some funny sew-on patches on aliexpress, and I’ll definitely order some of them again when I run out.

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Seam-sealing the Skinny Pack

Let me share with you some afterthoughts on my first foray into seam-sealing. I did a bit of digging, and opted to use 3M 9485PC double sided transfer tape. Overall, it’s a great product to work with, but I think the fabric used here, (Dyneema®/Nylon Ripstop) is too heavy and does not bend well enough to really work as a the internal face of the seam sealing. If I was to do it again, I would probably go for DCF.

3M 9485PC tape and prepared strips with Dyneema®/Nylon Ripstop fabric on one side.

One interesting learning I made, is that on lightweight silicon-coated Nylon fabric (60g/m²), this tape did not stick at all! I wasted a good strip. I don’t have the reference anymore, but I would assume the Dyneema®/Nylon Ripstop fabric that really worked well was PU coated. Beware!

This experiment taught me one important thing: I will not seam-seal my pack except in very specific circumstances. It’s just too much of a hassle.

Here are a few pictures of the construction process behind building the Skinny pack. If you are wondering why I am wearing gloves in some of the pictures, it’s because I wasn’t sure how sticky the stuff is. I turned out to be utterly unnecessary, and I quickly removed them.

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