Backpacks for Camp NanaB

For this year's Camp NanaB (the week of activities at my mother-in-law's house), I sewed each "camper" a backpack to hold their treasures.  We used them to pack the kids' things when we went paddle boating and for a picnic at Stoney Creek Metropark, but otherwise the kids basically ignored them.  That's cool though -- I made them more to amuse myself than for any true practical purpose.  I'm pretty annoyed at myself for not having taken cute photos of these backpacks with the kids wearing them, but c'est la vie.

This one was for my nephew, Quinn.

That was a buttload of grommets to install.  Grommets look cool, but they are kind of a pain in the butt to put in when going through many layers of fusible fleece!  When I finished the twelfth one, I swore I would never use them again.  That's likely to change though because I love them too much.

The backpack for my niece, Maisie, had strawberries on it.  Peter's has flames, of course, and Charlotte's has cool cats.  Here is a shockingly horrid cell phone pic I took of them the night I finished them.  I could have at least moved some of the detritus off of the counter before I snapped the shot!

I used a tutorial for a String Style Backpack with Crossover Pockets from Sew4Home.  The tutorial was great. but padding the crossover pockets with batting was a bit of overkill.  The backpacks are a little difficult for the kids to open and close, but practice will probably solve that.  The straps ended up quite long for the kids, so I had to shorten them (which compromised the ability of the bag to lie flat when all the way open).  In the future, I would probably shorten the whole backpack a little so the straps could be shorter without issue.