Back To School 2017 - All The Backpack Details

I’m super excited to finally share the details of Bean’s back to school outfit and backpack. We’re on tour with Sprouting JubeJube and Lulu & Celeste for Back to School 2017 and with Bean starting her first grade year way back in early September it’s been so hard keeping the details from you this long!

Back To School 2017

You guys!! That epic backpack, hehe. I let her pick out the fabrics and she chose basically every fabric that should never be used for a structured bag, but somehow I made it work. I’ll post all the hairy details below in case someone’s just crazy enough to make one too.

Back To School 2017 But first, I want to point out this fabulous Crossroads Dress (or View G For Free would work too!) and Paneled Sunsuit MashUp. I’ve made a few of these so far with more versions in the works and they are Bean’s absolute favorite these days. Super comfy and stylish. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to post all the MashUp details on here soon. But seriously, it’s so easy I’m sure you’ll figure it out yourself before I even get the post up!

Back To School 2017 Last year I surprised Bean with a fun Panda Backpack for Kindergarten and she loved it. But this year I thought she should be able to pick out her own backpack details and she had very strong opinions about what she wanted.

Back To School 2017 Her first demand – ahem request – was for the backpack to be pink velvet just like a dress I made her last spring. Well of course that fabric was a knit and not really the best option for the structure of a bag, but there was no talking her out of it. I ended up using stiff interfacing on all the velvet pieces to make sure they could hold their shape and not stretch out. Also, since the velvet will pick up every single piece of mulch or dirt, I added a faux leather panel to the bottom of the bag to help with keeping the pink portions off the ground.

Back To School 2017 So of course the crazy town fabric choices didn’t end there. She wanted this cosplay stretch gold fabric for the inside of the bag. I kind of thought it’d be cool cause it’s slippery and if something got sticky in there (ugh lunch remnants…) it’d be east to clean, but again with the stretch fabric. I used more interfacing on those pieces too. I had some gold chevron fabric that would work well for the binding inside so I made a ton of it one afternoon to make sure I had enough for the bag.

Back To School 2017 The pattern I used is the Cumberland Backpack from Sew Sweetness which is the same one I used for her last year and then I also made the smaller version for a purse backpack for myself. It’s a great pattern and I didn’t make too many changes to it to make it work. One modification was to make the straps have a bound edge instead of turned inside out. I wanted to use the faux leather (another choice she made) and the idea of trying to turn that fabric inside out freaked me out. Plus I was able to use more of the gold chevron binding I made for the inside of the backpack which was fun.

Back To School 2017 Another change I made was to add side pockets to hold her water bottle. These were just rectangles where I made a pleat in the bottom and an elastic channel at the top edge. Super simple.

Back To School 2017 Inside the front pocket, I used more of the gold stretchy fabric and some stretch mesh sequined fabric for the “mesh” zipper pocket. She wanted that sequined fabric soooooo badly and I thought this would be a fun use for it inside.

Back To School 2017 And finally, for the front snap pocket I used more of the sequined stretch fabric to add some bling. Since it is a see-through mesh fabric, I backed each piece with a piece of the gold stretch fabric and then interfaced the whole piece. The mesh looks great with the gold fabric backing, so I’m happy with how it all turned out.

Back To School 2017 So far (almost a month in) the backpack has held up extremely well and first grade has been a big hit! Fingers crossed for the next nine months hehe!