Piney's Needle: Repairing Backpacks

The plastic workings of a backpack and the door of a car do not make good friends. I wish I had taken a before picture, but needless to say, after getting slammed in the door of the car, this was all that was left of the plastic adjustable buckle on the shoulder strap of my son's backpack.

A good backpack, one that is sturdy enough to carry all those college books and a laptop, are crazy expensive. So Adam brought it to me to fix, much like he did the visors from his truck and other items that needed recovering or fixing, not to mention all his ripped jeans.

"Surely if you can sew, you can fix this stuff."

Maybe I can. I had kept all those little belts of his with similar buckles. We have a drawer of odds and ends such as these belts and other strange buckles and snaps. The problem was, I did not want to put such strange fabrics through my sewing machine. Whatever had to be done, had to be done by hand.

Would it be sturdy enough to withstand the torture it's going to receive? Time will tell.

I cut the ends of the belt and removed the two plastic pieces, doing the same on the backpack. Adding the piece that will hold the adjustable strap to the backpack was fairly simple. I used double threaded quilting thread and rolled the edge to hide the raw edges (which fray easily).

Adding the buckle side to the shoulder strap was a bit more challenging. I cut the small strap as close as I could to the X-marked portion (see below). There wasn't enough fabric to roll the raw edges, so I inserted the buckle and stitched through the strap several times. To keep these raw edges from fraying, I burned the edges which melts the fabric. I did this on both the cut edges.