backpack | justellydotcom

As I mentioned in one of my recent posts, I didn’t do much sewing last year.
But one project I did manage to finish is this roll-top backpack.
I’ve always liked roll-top backpacks. If you don’t have much in your backpack, you can roll it up small. But you can also use it when you want to carry a lot.

The last time I was on a beach vacation, my goddaughter saw a roll-top backpack that she really liked. Luckily for me, the quality of that backpack was very poor. That gave me the idea to sew one for her.
I used the same waterproof canvas as I did for the cat fanny pack.

https://justelly.com/2026/04/05/diy-fanny-pack-for-cat-lovers/

I knew very early on what colors I wanted for the backpack.
I also knew I wanted graphics that reflected her hobbies: traveling and photography.
I spent ages thinking about what I could do. And then, of course, it took a while to find the graphics I had in mind online.
I found the road sign and the backpack pretty quickly. But finding the stick figure with the camera took a while.
I modified the road sign a bit and added the names of the cities she’d been to.

The backpack measures 24 by 14 inches. So there’s definitely enough room to fit a camera kit inside.

When rolled up, the backpack is almost half the size, hehe

Here’s a close-up of the graphic.
I had asked the employee at the copy shop to thicken ALL the black lines. Apparently, he forgot to do that for the backpack in the graphic. Unfortunately, the lines there are thinner.

Years ago, I saw this fabric online. And of course, I DIDN’T buy it because I didn’t have any use for it in my projects. 😀
I searched for it all over the internet and finally found it in Poland. It was crazy expensive, but it was worth it to me. This fabric was the perfect finishing touch for the design on the outside.

I think the backpack turned out great ❤

I think it’s been almost 2 years since I saw the most beautiful little handbag in the world on Pinterest. ❤ ❤ ❤
I won’t write who the designer is, just that you couldn’t buy the bag anymore.
But because I really wanted to have it, preferably as a backpack, I decided to sew this bag myself.

Getting the black faux leather was easy. The original is made of real leather, but almost impossible to make with a normal sewing machine. The hardest part was finding a shiny gold-colored zipper, which had to be huge.
I also spent a long time looking for pins because I didn’t know which ones to choose for the bag. I decided on colorful, funny 😀

I bought a really cute little leather jacket for toddlers as a model for the jacket, which was very well priced. Lucky for me. 😀 A pattern has been made from it

I won’t describe in detail HOW I made this backpack, but I will show a few cell phone photos from the sewing course.

I don’t know if you can tell from the picture how huge the zipper is.

I made a new logo for the very expensive lining and the collar cut-out. My others all have something to do with nautical, which wouldn’t have fitted here.

I don’t know if you can see it in the pictures, but I had the lettering printed in gold on the black lining. It looks really classy. ❤

Fortunately, I came across the lockers while searching for pins!!! How else could I have attached the pins through 3 layers of faux leather without them coming off? You can see the lockers in the picture, but later on they were covered with faux leather.

Don’t be surprised that the lining is visually so badly sewn, what you see here is just the back of the lining that I used for the collar neckline. To make it look nice and smooth on the front, I had to fix the lining on the back in some places.

The pocket flap is almost finished, but not yet sewn on. How do you like the pins?

And now the finished backpack. If you look at the size of the pins, you can see how big the zipper really is.
I love this backpack ❤ ❤ ❤

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