Drawstring backpack

Every morning when I take the dog out I carry her toys in a drawstring backpack that I bought from etsy a few years ago. I attach my dog treat bag to the cords. Over time the metal attachment for the dog treat bag has worn a hole in the fabric, so I’ve been thinking that it was time to find another one.

In my Sew what! bags book there is a pattern for a drawstring backpack. This afternoon, having finished my chores, I thought I’d experiment. I knew that I didn’t really want a pocket on the bag, so I skipped that section of the pattern. I also couldn’t really be bothered to sew straps for a prototype backpack, so I figured I’d buy some black cord instead (and for the record I bought 3.10m of the stuff). I also knew that I wanted it to be slightly smaller than my current bag, so I measured that, compared it with the book and made some sketches.

I used some plain grey cotton fabric for the body of the bag. It should be something heavier weight than this, but I decided that as this was to be a prototype bag and an experiment and I had enough grey cotton fabric to hand, it would do.

My current bag has fabric slots for the cord to go through at the bottom of the bag, and that has held together pretty well, so I decided to improvise the pattern a bit more to do something like that. I made three black pieces - one each for the two cords, and one to hang the dog treat bag off to try and stop the rubbing that I’d experienced with my last bag. To make these I took pieces of fabric 3” x 1.5” and folded them in half, and then folded the edges into the middle and sewed the edge together. This made thin, firm pieces which I slotted into the bag before sewing it together.

As expected, these black pieces added quite a lot of thickness to the bottom of the bag, but my trusty little sewing machine coped admirably and managed to sew through them ok. After sewing once around all of the bag, I sewed around it again using a zig zag stitch before sewing again in a normal running stitch. I zig zagged over the attaching pieces a few times to give extra security.

The bag has ended up being 12.5” wide x 14” tall and looks like, size wise at least, it’ll do the job well. I don’t expect it to last very long as it is such thin fabric but it’s been a good experiment nonetheless and I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.