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.

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…