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.
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.
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.
Item
Quantity
Price (total)
Ikea Frakta shopping bag
1
0.99€
Upcycled 10mm Polyester webbing
50cm
0€
Remant 15mm Strong Polyester webbing
60cm
1€
Reused Lineloc tensioners
2
0€
12mm D-Rings (0.30€ each)
2
0.60€
Reused 3mm Cord
1m
0€
Scrap Uncoated Cordura
0.04m²
0€
Scrap Hook & Loop Tape (Velcro)
25cm
0€
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!
Given that my goal here was to make a good looking day-pack which can double as hiking backpack for a Christmas gift, I did not go overboard with the design and details, and stayed within the realm of lightweight and simple designs with more generic features. I opted for the lean front instead of a cargo pocket I was considering in the design to keep the day-pack feeling, and made use of the front zipper pocket idea to keep in line with daily commuting habits and needs. I know you are curious, so without further due, here is a picture of the (almost) final pack.
What do you mean that’s not a bag yet? 😁
The finished pack ended up a bit fatter on the bottom side than the pattern it was based on (you will see some differences with the Skinny pack) but I kept it in line with the overall slimness/tallness of the original design. To get a bit more volume out of it, I also extended the maximum capacity of the pack with a higher roll-top, which brings the typical volume of this pack to about 25 to 30 liters. Another key difference is the much bulkier side pockets, which are clearly highlighting the hiking side of the design.
Side Pockets
To counter the risk of water pooling in the side pockets due to how waterproof the X-Pac fabrics are, I finished the bottom-most side of the pockets with a strong mesh which acts as both a water drain, and a more stretchable fabric for the pockets themselves. The same design with only the VX-07 fabric would not allow a bottle to sit all the way down the pocket. This one does.
Padding the back panel
The back of the pack follows my most recent padding concept, with a high quality 8mm closed-cell foam pad coupled with a 3D mesh to offer a decent level of comfort and good breathability. This construction only covers the center part of the back panel. I find that the weight-to-support ratio of this construction is a good balance, and although this does not really qualify as ultra-light, I would probably consider this on most of my personal upcoming hiking and trekking packs.
The dimensions and V-shape of the padding are meant to follow the human torso’s shape, and I find that sweat mostly accumulates following the vertebrae, which is where the 3D mesh will make the most difference. I also consciously pack bags to avoid sharp edges anywhere my bones protrude (shoulder blades, pelvis) and found that this configuration give me adequate protection for my back without sacrificing too much weight.
Simple shoulder straps
If there is one construction stage I enjoy the least, it’s making the shoulder straps. I’ve been through many different concepts and iterations, and never quite liked the result or the process enough to make it my standard approach. That is, until recently, when I decided to completely avoid padding the straps with any kind of foam and rely on a better profile to spread the weight on one’s shoulders.
I designed curved straps which rely only on 3D mesh, and present a bit of a wider profile to compensate the lack of foam padding. Depending on the expected pack load and the fabric used, I usually add a daisy-chain webbing all along the strap, or only at both ends for the load lifters and accessory loops. The reason I mention load is that I found with loads higher than 6 kilograms the fabric’s normal stretch and the 3D mesh limited padding will be hampered by the webbing, which then tends to dig into one’s shoulders, effectively removing the benefit of a wider shoulder strap. If the webbing does not cover the shoulders, the fabric’s stretch will help spread loads more evenly.
The reason for me to ditch the foam was mainly due to how cumbersome and over-complicated it is to build strap with high-quality closed-cell foam. I have used Evazote EV50 in different thicknesses (mainly 4mm and 8mm) and always preferred building the straps as a sleeve (seams on the inside) for comfort as well as robustness. The major drawback of this method is that inserting the foam a posteriori never really yields perfect aesthetic (at least, I’m not skilled enough to make it look good). On one hand, EV50 tends to be very “sticky” and making the whole inserting process quite annoying. On the other hand, the sawing machine I use has limited clearance below the foot, and the stack of 3D mesh, 8mm EV50, fabric and webbing is just too much for a household machine to handle.
Now enough with the text, and on to the pictures! I have limited pictures of the final pack because I was running out of time and had to eventually gift it away, but I do have a significant amount of behind the scene pictures, which hopefully will be as satisfying to you as these are to me. Stayed tunes for the next post.
I must have been spending hours on the concept itself, and just mentally iterating through constructions and ideas, starting from a burrito shape, to ultra complicated constructions, until I finally landed on a appealing concept. After that, I easily spent 20 hours building the pack itself. But between the build idea, and the first cuts, there really wasn’t time at all.
That the last scribbles I made before jumping right in.
You’ve guessed it, I worked slow to avoid mistakes because I was still improvising quite a bit. I sketched a few different drawings and highlighted the details I wanted to add, then marked all the small things that are easily missed, and I got cracking almost immediately. If you look closer at the sketches above, the idea I started with was to have a third compartment that would have been strapped atop the flaps, securing the secondary compartment, creating essentially a sandwich pack. As you can see with the finished pack, I quickly dismissed that idea.
This workflow is somewhat an evolution to my normal process. I usually spend a lot of time sketching and doodling and measuring and thinking, before starting to work fast. But I definitely recommend the exercise every so often! It’s a good way to test your spatial acuity and your building habits.
On a side note, this is the second backpack I build with unpadded shoulder straps, the first one was also a spur of the moment thing. I was just tired of struggling while trying to slide the foam inside the straps, and decided to give that a try instead. I’m quite happy with the comfort the 3D mesh provides for small to medium loads (up to 6kg) and I’ll probably stick to this construction for a while. But sometimes, an idea will make things worse, just keep that in mind!
The shoulder straps are just made of 3D mesh (3mm) and a top layer out of Cordura.
You might be wandering what the “buffers” are for. I added them to the pattern so that even with even seam allowance, you should end-up with more fabrics on the tricky parts, which you can then trim later during the pack build.
As always, go slow, and use clips!
If you don’t have a printer to print patterns, that’s fine. I don’t have one. Instead, I take some thin Tyvek, and I draw the patterns by hand. Why Tyvek? It very durable, so I have a pattern I can abuse, clip, tape, and reuse for ever.
There is something to be said about simple designs. In this case, building the Slumber pack as a very simple “brick” shape made the construction of each panel a breeze, and completely independent from one-another, at least until the final assembly.
