Hello folks, it's me again.

Over the course of the last few months, I've started to intensify my efforts regarding my not-so-new hobby, namely: sewing.

Roughly three months back, I've started my quest of designing, patterning and ultimately sewing my own EDC / Travel backpack, and since then I've often times asked myself what the fuck I was on when I made that decision.

See, I'm a very precise and perfectionistic individual when it comes to things like this; It simply has to be done right, or I'll be on an inner tantrum-tirade for a while, and thus, these things usually take me a lot of time, energy and - sadly - money; I often try to mitigate the part where the third point comes into play by throwing copious amounts of measuring, analyzing and planning up-front, which I did this time as well.

As a result, designing and patterning went pretty damn good, and I was pleasantly looking forward on having theory and practice have a love-child together, but nope: "Practice" took a hammer instead and shattered my dreams.

"Alas", I thought, "let's make a list of what didn't work, and make it work next time", and so I did. And again, and again, and again.

In the end, I was down three backpack-prototypes and countless hours of going back-and-forth, back-and-forth, only to realize that a) I'm not happy with it, and b) that shit's not going to fly this way.

To make it short: I started over.

It might come as a surprise, but this time around, I had some glaring suspicion of what would work and what wouldn't, and thus I was able to get a proper prototype of the new-and-improved design together rather quickly. The reason it went so well was because I had made quite some errors on earlier trials - which, believe it or not, I learned from - but also because I've started incorporating trials on a smaller scale directly alongside designing and patterning, allowing me to directly change things that don't work before I call a design "done", only to realize that half of it ain't gonna work.

Although the second approach was wildly better - it delivered the pattern to the final backpack I'll start working on this week -, it was also wildly more annoying to me: Instead of finishing the design in one go, I constantly had to move back-and-forth between patterning, cutting small pieces of fabric, setting up a laser file, cutting said file with the laser cutter out of the prepped piece of fabric, and sew the parts together, only to either move one step forward- or two steps back depending on the outcome of the sewed item. And again, and again, and again.

I hated it. What was envisioned as me gracefully finishing one task after the other right at once and do so with all the tasks at hand, only to even more gracefully master the assembly of the item in mind, ended in me questioning my sanity - but alas, I wouldn't be Fabs if I wouldn't find a way to make it work, and so I did