Mending: Sashiko/Boro Backpack

Several years ago, I bought a backpack from the Surplus Store on the corner of National and Venice in Culver City. (I love that store. I still go back every time I visit family in L.A.) I carried that backpack to work daily for five years, which is a very respectable lifespan. It had enough room for a packed lunch, a crafty project, and a book (three things I never leave home without) AND a bunch of groceries besides. Alternatively, it could comfortably accommodate clothing, toiletries, and entertainment for a 3-day business trip or, stretched to its limits, a week-long backpacking trip. It had plenty of separate pockets of different sizes so that I never had to go fishing for my keys, wallet, or work ID in amongst the jumble of other random crap. It was a good backpack.

At long last, however, the fabric started to tear around the top of the right shoulder strap--the one I use to pick it up all the time. I no longer trusted it to carry heavy loads without ripping farther. I removed it from service but couldn't quite bring myself to throw it away. After all, we'd been through so much together, and none of the other backpacks I could find offered the same carrying capacity, or so many convenient pockets. I bought two other backpacks whose zippers ceased to function in less than a year, and they barely had enough room for my sewing, lunch, and book, let alone a week's worth of clothing. As Steve and I were packing for a week-long stay on a hippy commune, my eyes kept straying to my poor injured backpack, and I decided it was time to give it a new lease on life. I got out my trusty sewing kit and set to work.

The biggest structural issue that I needed to address was the ripped fabric around the shoulder strap. There were small rips in both the top of the bag and on the shoulder strap itself. Only the right side was noticeably ripped, but I figured the left couldn't be too far behind, so I carefully clipped the stitches around both straps, setting aside the little loop at the top.

On lightweight fabrics that don't undergo a lot of stress, darning can create a nearly invisible mend. This mend needs to be able to take a beating though, so I opted for a patch instead. The strongest fabric in my stash is corset coutil, which is designed to take a LOT of stress without ripping. I cut a rectangle that was significantly larger than the damaged area so that it would distribute the strain, and pinned it to the inside of the backpack, covering the damaged spot. 

In order to connect the patch to the damaged fabric as thoroughly as possible, I decided to quilt the two together using a sashiko stitching pattern that I'd seen on pinterest.

Although the finished project looks complicated, the technique is actually very simple. It's just rows of evenly-spaced running stitches in two different directions. You do all of the stitches going in one direction first, and then connect the dots with all of the stitches running the other direction. Because the fabric of the backpack is a cotton canvas with a fairly pronounced plain tabby weave, I didn't even bother marking lines; I just used the grain of the fabric as a guide to keep my stitches more-or-less straight and evenly spaced.

I continued the stitching past the edges of the coutil patch, partly so that the stitching would prevent the coutil from fraying, and partly so that there would be a more gradual transition between the stiff, reinforced area and the weaker, un-reinforced area. Having a hard edge tends to create a stress point at the edges of the repair.

On the inside, you can see the coutil patch, with the stitching
extending beyond its edges.

The tops of the straps were
reinforced with coutil inside,
then stitched back together.

Once the main part of the backpack was mended, I reinforced the tops of the shoulder straps. To do that, I unpicked the top 6 inches or so of stitching that was holding them together, cut some more scraps of corset coutil, and used it to line the tops of the shoulder straps. Holding the coutil in place, I re-folded the straps and replaced the line of stitching up the center.

Having used the backpack a bit more now, I really should cut entirely new straps because the fabric is wearing through further down as well, but that will have to wait for another day. For the time being, I have a reliable, capacious traveling bag once more.