Made by a Fabricista: Range Backpack

Hi there sewing friends! This post is an exciting one for me because it marks my return to sewing! Ha! My sewing machine has been packed up and stored away in the corner of my bedroom since the beginning of July!

You see, my family decided to renovate our kitchen, and our kitchen used to have a teen-incy little room off to the side of it that held all of my crafting and sewing supplies. Well, we knocked that wall down back in July and have been working non stop (literally every free minute we've had) for the past three months on the kitchen renovation!

You'd think we were done with the renovation (it has been three months!), but we're not even close. We've been doing 90% of the work ourselves, and honestly, if we could pause the rest of our lives (like school, church, sports, work) I'm sure we could finish quickly, but life is still moving forward, so our renovation is slowly crawling along!

I know, I know, you came here to hear about sewing, and not about my renovation drama, so let's dive into some sewing details! This is the range backpack pattern (by Anna Graham of Noodlehead). I have loved the look of this bag ever since pics started popping up on instagram!

I looked around the fabric mart website for some sturdy, heavy duty fabric and landed on this beautiful wool fabric. I wasn't sure if it would work for a bag, but I've seen several other wool bags online, so I hit order and crossed my fingers that it would work for this pattern!

When it arrived in the mail I knew it was perfect! This wool is backed by a solid black polyester fabric, making it super sturdy and the perfect weight to sew a bag! I used the wool for the majority of the range backpack, but used the solid black polyester side of the fabric for the contrast bottom!  I love how the two fabrics look together!

The range backpack pattern was really easy to follow! Since the wool fabric was so thick, and at many times I was sewing through several layers of fabric, I used a jeans needle in my sewing machine, which worked perfectly.

Sewing this bag was a little interesting since most of my sewing supplies are still packed away. When I found some free time to sew, I couldn't find where I had packed away any pins or clips to hold the fabric together. I ended up using clothes pins (during a renovation, you do what you can do)! Because of my funny improvising, I see little imperfections that bug me (like the wonky lines by the zipper) but thankfully my sweet girl doesn't notice any of those mistakes and loves her new bag!

The range backpack pattern calls for a lining, but since this fabric is backed, I omitted the lining and instead just turned down the top 1.5 inches and topstitched that fold in place. The only other change I made was to add that swivel clip instead of the fabric closure as called for in the pattern. This honestly wasn't the plan, but the wool fabric was so thick, I couldn't thread it through the d rings, so had to come up with another plan. I love how the clip looks and am so glad that's what I ended up using!

Here's a quick recap of the details:

Fabric: Double Faced Wool Coating
Pattern: Range Backpack
Modifications: omitted lining, clip closure instead of fabric closure

One last thing. The listing for this wool coating says it is a warm gray. I agree, bit I would add that it has a little bit (very slight) pink tone with the gray, that I absolutely love! I was pleasantly surprised to see the color of the fabric and it turned out to be even prettier in person than pictured on the computer! Okay, off to go work on the kitchen renovation some more...