Should I Make a Backpack?

Klum House launched a new sewing pattern this week, the Slabtown Rolltop Backpack, and I am thinking this may be my next big project.

The kits include a lot of great color combos, including this green one (love love love). Not all of the the kit colors are available as yardage. This may be one of those instances where buying the complete kit makes more sense than trying to source everything separately.

Klum House has had a series of blog posts recently with a behind-the-scenes peek into the development of the pattern. I love those kinds of posts because I love to see and read about other makers’ design processes. They also had to contend with supply disruptions this spring, which pushed back the launch of the pattern.

I’ve wanted to make a backpack for a while now, but hadn’t found a pattern I liked. This one comes pretty close. I am not crazy about the rolltop style, but perhaps I will be if I make one and start using it. I listened to the Sewing with Threads podcast yesterday and the guest was designer Becky Fulgoni. She talked about how she is experimenting with backpack patterns and has made every pattern she can get her hands on. It sounded like her goal was to come up with one pattern that incorporates all the features she likes from other patterns.

And I still need to make some T-shirts. I watched a Mimi G YouTube video about making a T-shirt from an existing pattern and I might try some of her techniques.

[One of the best podcast interviews I ever listened to was with Mimi G on the Craft Industry Alliance podcast. The story of how she built her business is fascinating. She has several YouTube channels in addition to the Mimi G Style channel and all of them are excellent.]

My sewing this week has consisted of sewing together strips from the scrap bag, which is what I do when I can’t focus on anything else. These will probably end up in another Candy Coated Quilt (I’m up to the sixth or seventh one now). It occurred to me yesterday that the Ritzville Mennonite Relief Sale scheduled for October might be yet another casualty of this coronavirus pandemic. The sale could, theoretically, be done online, but either way, I would like to be able to donate some quilts.

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I maintain my stance that social media is one of the biggest ills of modern life. I think it takes a fair bit of skill to give it a place in one’s life without allowing it to take over or skew one’s perspective. (I worry about some of my Facebook friends who seem so obsessed with social media that it appears to be affecting their mental health.) I am on social media to get information that I wouldn’t get anywhere else. Still, it is useful to unplug every so often. And I have to do that even though I work really hard to curate my feeds so they don’t become echo chambers. A good example of that is a woman I follow on Twitter. I started following her because she’s a knitter, something we have in common. She’s also an African-American woman with differing political views who lives in a major metropolitan area on the other side of the country. We don’t have any of that in common. I appreciate having her in my Twitter feed, though, because she speaks with brutal honesty about what she is seeing where she lives. Sometimes it’s hard to hear what she has to say. But she’s a knitter and a human being. Common ground.

I need to call the pig supplier today and make arrangements to pick up piglets tomorrow. I have three rows of beans left to plant and will knock those out this morning. After that, the to-do list will consist only of weeding and moving compost. Lather, rinse, repeat.