The Sewing Basics: Gathering your basic gear and skills for Gear Repair and Construction

 As you can see from these crude repairs on the tattered hem of my old MSR stove sack, and my deteriorting shoulder straps, I have been repairing my gear as best as possible both off and on the trail.

Notice above how there is a new, machine stitched seam backing up my old crude stitching.

Above and below, when my shoulder straps were breaking apart on the trail, (ah, those darling gophers) and the seat of my pants was going its own direction, the fine people at Kennedy Meadows Pack station set me up with a needle and thread, and I got to work. 

As you can see from the above I am quite adverse to throwing away gear that can be repaired. Yet hand stitching, though satisfying, is slow and messy. So when I had a chance to buy a 1970 Singer Touch and Sew for $10., I jumped on it.

Since I am using this machine for heavy synthetic material repairs and construction I obtained some heavy duty %100 Polyester Gutermann thread, some 100/16 needles, and a few yards of heavy polyester materials color-matched for my first repair jobs.

For the machine I bought some tri-flow oil, bobbins, and set myself up with the proper cutting, cleaning, and thread manipulation tools.

Next, I downloaded the manual for my machine from International Sewing Machine Collectors' Society. With the manual I was able to ascertain how to thread the machine, wind the bobbin, and begin to learn the proper adjustments for the thread tension, the presser foot, the stitch length and width, as well as speed and feed control.

I am using a variety of small projects to hone these basic sewing skills. I started out by making shoulder patches and doing hem repairs on my Poly Tank Top.

Then I picked up an expensive set of North Face zip-to-shorts pants that were returned to REI because the a small section of the mesh pocket seam failed. I bought them cheap, and it was cheap and easy to make them whole.

Above you can see the external side of the seam that repaired the mesh pocket. It is above the zipped-off pant leg. Below is the internal seam.

Next, I patched the bottom of my city backpack. I made a heavy-duty pleated patch, carefully worked the bottom of the pack under the needle, and stitched a patch into the inside bottom of my pack. It was like sewing inside of a small backpack. But it worked well, and I also reinforced all of the seams.

Now that I've got some of the basic sewing skills together, I'm putting together my first real project: A long-sleeved backpacking shirt.

I've decided on the material, 80% Nylon, 20% Polyester. Now I'm looking for a shirt pattern. Then I'm going to figure out how to set up a custom shirt pattern for my specific measurements. After that I'm figuring that it will take me a bit of practice and experience to control the skills necessary to put all of this together into a fine backpacking shirt.

I'm hoping that the first shirt will be usable, and the second will be decent. 

If anyone has any suggestions for good shirt patterns suitable for backpacking use, please let me know!

If you are doing, or have done any cool backpacking projects, I'd like to hear about it. Comments can be made below, or you can register and post articles about your sewing adventures.

I've got a very experienced sewing mentor, and Zandar58 has been sewing light backpacking gear together. So if you have technical questions, we can get Eggiwegger (The Expert Seamstress) and likely Zandar to get you pointed in the right direction.

Next, I'm going to post a page of backpacker sewing links to sites with materials, patterns, kits, and information that will be of service to backcountry stitchers.