Penguin Pack-Packs

This is another of the things I made before we flew back in December. This is the girls at the Frankfurt airport wearing their Oliver + S Little Things to Sew back packs. It's actually two patterns. The one I just mentioned for the penguin part but the size and actual pattern is the Made by Rae toddler back pack the larger version (it's larger than the original one she put out by about 2" all around making it able to fit regular size folders). She sells this add on to the pattern on her blog.

I made the zipper ...two headed? Double ended? What do you call that? I can't think of the word for it right now. It has two zipper pulls and I like it.

These were taken with nothing in them so you can see how the peltex holds the shape.

I did the front pockets two different ways. Ava's has piping all around hers and I just can't decide if I like it..in fact I started to unpick it as you can see in the photo then decided I just didn't have time as I started both back packs a week before we were to leave.  

When looking through the Oliver & S flickr pool for inspiration, I noticed that all the back packs had one thing in common: they all dropped and had no structure. So I added Peltex in the front, back,sides and bottom but not the zipper part. I also added piping around the whole thing but that had nothing to do with structure. Well actually it did. I thought it might make the front not look all puckery and caved in when stuff was in the back pack. In the 1st photo Emily has hers stuffed with thick heavy coloring books and other stuff so it does cave in at the top...really I have no idea if the peltex helped; I just liked the sturdiness of it in the end.

They really loved the back packs which makes me happy. I have a feeling though that if I rolled some dirty fabric around an empty toilet paper roll they would ew and ah. Simple kids. They get that from Jon's side of the family.