Last month, I treated myself to a couple of Architextures prints and the Day in the Park Backpack Tote pattern. I love bags that can also turn into backpacks! It makes it easier to chase after my boys in stores while bystanders wonder why that mom doesn’t have her kids under better control. :>


The bag closes with a magnetic snap, and I’d like to say again that I dooooon’t like sew-in magnetic snaps. I can’t sew around them neatly! After I finished the bag, I vaguely remembered that it might work better if I sewed the magnetic snap to the sew-in interfacing instead of the wrong side of the bag lining, but pfft. I think the prong magnet snaps look nice, so I’ll just use those in the future! Plus, this bag never closes anyway because it’s always stuffed too full.


This had an awful lot of pattern pieces, so it took me a while to cut just because I kept forgetting what I was doing and kept flipping through all my bits of paper. Some of the pattern pieces were just rectangles, though, and I understood that they were included because of pressing guide marks and things like that, but it added to my paper overload confusion.


These straps are ingenious and so comfy! Plus, I like that when I put on or take it off as a backpack, it doesn’t go sliding off wonkily sideways the way it would if the backpacky straps were one long piece. Mr. Yazoo said this is his favorite of the bags I’ve made myself so far.


I want to make more of these, and maybe I’ll be ambitious enough to try to add an inset zipper at the top!

Back in the fall, we had a family trip planned to New York, and so I needed to make myself a Weekender for my carry on bag. This is what I made!



Since it was for me, I excused myself from the hassle of trying to match up the zig zags on the pockets and zipper whatsadoodle. I also skimped on the length of the green shoulder straps, hoping that quilting wof would be enough. It wasn’t quite, and made those handles a little hard to use. I didn’t notice much, though, since one-inch straps are uncomfortable anyway when such a big bag is full of stuff, so I hardly used them at all.

I made eighty jillion (or four) pocket modifications: I added a zippered pocket inside one of the outer pockets, slip pockets and a zippered pocket inside the main body, and I changed the back outer pocket to a zippered one.



Like the interior of the bag? This is what happens when you only buy half-yard cuts of all your fabric.



Finally, I added a shoulder strap, but I attached it to the bag waaaaaay too low down, which meant that the bag had a tendency to want to tip over when you used the shoulder strap! That bugged me the whole trip; fortunately, Mr. Yazoo mostly carried my bag for me, so I didn’t have to struggle with it. I’m thinking I might try buying some rivets to make the strap attached higher to the body so it’s more useful.



This sucker is heavy, even when it’s empty! It was an awesome carry on in that it held a ton and fit pretty nicely under the airplane seat, but it was a huge pain because it was uncomfy to carry, heavy, and tippy. The one thing I really love about it its awesome vintage zipper. I can’t bring myself to rip it apart to reclaim the zipper, so now I’m waffling about whether to try fixing the shoulder strap, and then whether to keep it for our next big vacation (yeaaaaars from now) or to give it to my sister since she travels a lot and is always super nice about things I make. heh!