Sail cloth Raspberry rucksack
The first iteration of the Raspberry Rucksack was back in November 2020. You can read about it here, although that blog post is very brief I realise, reading it back. At some point I will go back and beef up that article, it would be an interesting project to add to my ‘Where are they now’ series because that rucksack has since been sold on Depop and is hopefully living it’s best life with someone else.
This was my second attempt at this pattern and I made it specifically for my Gran. The fabric was sail cloth from her old boat, which had long since been sold. The spare sails were stashed in the garage and I’ve been gradually making use of them in various sewing projects, mainly Sierra totes for various family members (and a Sam apron for me!). It’s not the easiest to work with, it’s a plastic-based man made fabric so is quite slippery to manipulate and skipped stitches abound. Mostly though, so long as I take my time and concentrate, it’s fine.
The Raspberry Rucksack is a digital pattern from Sarah Kirsten. It’s based on the trendy Fjallraven Kanken backpack, which I will admit is why I bought the pattern. I realised in making the first version for myself, you need quite a sturdy outer fabric, with chunky interfacing, to get the three dimensional appearance of the Fjallraven. The original fabric I chose, a waxed cotton and light cotton lining, was too thin really, even with interfacing. You can see the photos in that blog post, how flat and deflated the backpack looks. I thought this sail cloth might give more structure and I was mostly right. It’s still not the fully cuboid appearance I was going for but it’s heading in the right direction. These photos were taken with stuffing inside the bag, to give it the appearance of structure.
Looking back through my Google photos, to find the pictures for this post, I realised I filmed and captioned a whole video about this backpack back in May 2020. Side note; tell me you were unemployed during the pandemic without telling me you were unemployed during the pandemic! Thankfully I was out of work for just for a month right at the start, but I generated some quality content during that time. I really like the square design of this bag but as that video reminded me, it does make the zip a bit of a struggle where it navigates around the corners. For this version, I had to fold the zip flap back to guide the zip around the corners and I wondered at the time whether that would potentially prevent my gran from using it. It felt like a point of weakness, that over time would potentially break the zip.
She is still using it 3 years later with no obvious damage to the zip, as a bag for carrying dog stuff when she goes walking. Not quite the use case I was envisioning when I initially made it for her but so long as it’s getting use, that’s the main thing! I’ve since made a third version, which will get it’s own dedicated post soon, but I rounded off the corners in the next version, to avoid the zip catching. I also picked better fabric for the third version, so I definitely learned by making this sail cloth bag!