Project pattern
A rolltop rucksack knitted as a single tube upward from a garter-stitch base, with a panda charted across the whole front panel in stranded colourwork. The panda is drawn in two colours only: the face is the contrast yarn, and every black marking — ears, eye patches, nose, mouth — is simply the main colour showing through. Nothing is embroidered on afterwards.
A soft-sided box, 30 cm across, 20 cm deep and 55 cm tall, with a 12 cm collar that rolls down and clips shut. That box is where the thirty-five litres lives, and every stitch count in this pattern comes out of those three numbers.
| Finished size | 30 cm wide × 20 cm deep × 55 cm tall, plus a 12 cm collar |
|---|---|
| Capacity | 35 litres (33 L rolled tight, 36.6 L with the collar up) |
| Gauge | 22 sts & 28 rounds = 10 cm, stranded stockinette, blocked |
| Yarn | DK wool: about 900 m charcoal, 180 m cream |
| Needles | 3.5 mm, 80 cm circular · 3.25 mm for the base, pocket and straps |
| Construction | Garter base, stitches picked up all round, worked upward in one tube |
| Empty weight | about 700 g, lining and hardware included |
Two thirds of this project is knitting and one third is sewing. The lining, the webbing inside the straps and the stiffener in the base are not decoration — they are what stops eight kilos of shopping turning a beautiful tube of wool into a long grey sock. If you will not sew, knit the bag at 25 litres and carry lighter things.
A litre is a thousand cubic centimetres, so the whole question is one multiplication: width × depth × height ÷ 1000. Everything else on this page is the business of hitting those three measurements in wool.
The deductions are real and worth understanding. The lining is sewn with a 1.5 cm seam allowance and hangs slightly inside the knitting, which costs about a centimetre off every internal dimension. And a knitted box has soft corners rather than square ones — the four vertical corners round off over roughly 2 cm of radius each, which is another litre gone. Take those off and you land on thirty-five.
Thirty-five litres of rucksack is not thirty-five one-litre cartons. Rigid boxes stack badly: this pack takes eight cartons per layer and a bit under three layers, so about twenty-two cartons — and it is still a 35 L bag. Pack volume is measured as the space inside, and soft things fill space in a way boxes never will.
At 22 stitches to 10 cm, one stitch is 4.55 mm wide and one round is 3.57 mm tall. Multiply the outside measurements by those numbers and the whole pattern falls out — and because the bag is a closed tube, the circumference is what matters, not the width:
Nothing about the construction changes — only the numbers you cast on and how long you knit. The 48-stitch panda fits comfortably on the front of all three.
| Size | Front / back | Sides | Round | Body | Finished box | Usable |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 L | 62 sts (28.2 cm) | 40 sts (18.2 cm) | 204 sts | 128 rnds (45.7 cm) | 28 × 18 × 46 cm | 25 L |
| 35 L — as written | 66 sts (30.0 cm) | 44 sts (20.0 cm) | 220 sts | 154 rnds (55.0 cm) | 30 × 20 × 55 cm | 35 L |
| 45 L | 70 sts (31.8 cm) | 46 sts (20.9 cm) | 232 sts | 180 rnds (64.3 cm) | 32 × 21 × 64 cm | 45 L |
All three keep the 34-round collar. Cast on the side-panel count for the base and work the front-panel count in garter ridges; the picking-up arithmetic in the next section then works unchanged.
A backpack is a structural object. Choose the yarn for grip and the hardware for strength, and be honest with yourself about the sewing before you buy the wool.
A firm, round, non-superwash DK wool — Shetland, BFL, a woollen-spun British DK. Grip is the point: the stitches must hold onto each other under load, and superwash yarn is slippery and grows.
MC charcoal, about 900 m (4 skeins of 100 g / 230 m; buy 5).
CC undyed cream, about 180 m (buy 2 — running out mid-panda is a bad afternoon).
3.5 mm circular, 80 cm — the whole body.
3.5 mm straights or a short circular — swatching flat.
3.25 mm — the base, the pocket and the straps.
Four stitch markers, one distinct for the round.
Blunt darning needle, sharp sewing needle, strong polyester thread.
1 m × 1.4 m of 10 oz cotton duck for the lining.
3 m of 25 mm polyester webbing.
2 × 25 mm side-release buckles and 2 triglide sliders.
A 28 × 18 cm piece of 3 mm polypropylene sheet for the base.
A 100 × 8 cm strip of canvas to stiffen the collar.
Knitted fabric creeps: put a steady eight kilos on a knitted strap and it will be longer next month and longer still the month after, permanently. The straps in this pattern are knitted covers sewn onto 25 mm webbing, and the webbing runs unbroken from the top of the back panel to the base seam. Skip that and the pattern does not work — not slightly, not eventually, but by design.
In a jumper, gauge that is slightly off gives you a jumper that is slightly off. Here it gives you a bag whose canvas lining no longer fits inside it.
22 stitches and 28 rounds to 10 cm over two-colour stranded stockinette on 3.5 mm needles, measured after blocking. And, for the base, 22 stitches and 44 rows — 22 ridges — to 10 cm in garter stitch on 3.25 mm needles. That is a firm gauge for DK — deliberately. Swatch in the round, not flat: your stranded tension in the round is not your stranded tension flat, and this bag is knitted entirely in the round.
Two gauges, because they are two fabrics. Stranded knitting pulls in and garter spreads out, so the base is worked a needle size smaller to bring the two to the same 22 stitches — which is what lets the base edge and the front panel be the same 30 cm.
What an error costs, over 220 stitches:
Half a stitch out in either direction moves the finished circumference by more than two centimetres, and the lining you cut from the measurements above will be wrong by that amount all the way round. If your swatch will not come to gauge, change needle size until it does — and if you settle at a different gauge on purpose, recut the lining from your numbers, not these ones.
Forty-eight stitches wide and sixty rounds tall — 21.8 cm by 21.4 cm on the finished bag, which is as close to square as stitch geometry allows. Two yarns, and only ever two: the cream is the face, and the charcoal is at once the background and every marking on it.
The ears are charcoal discs with a two-stitch cream rim, which is the whole trick of this chart. On a charcoal ground a black ear would simply vanish; give it a rim and it reads as an ear, and the round still contains only two colours. The eye patches, the nose and the mouth work the same way — they are not added on top, they are places where the cream never happened.
That is why nothing here needs intarsia, bobbins, or duplicate stitch. Every round of the chart is ordinary two-colour stranded knitting, worked in the round, right side always facing you.
Hold the cream as the dominant yarn — the one carried below the other as you work — for all sixty rounds. Dominance makes those stitches sit fractionally wider and prouder, and on a motif this large the difference between a crisp panda and a slightly gappy one is exactly that. Whatever you choose, never swap hands mid-panda.
The widest single-colour run in this chart is 32 stitches, across the middle of the panda's face. That is a float of about 15 cm — far too long to leave loose. Catch the carried yarn every fifth stitch, and catch it in a different column on each round so the caught stitches do not stack into a visible line down the face.
The body is one unbroken tube of 220 stitches. Unrolled and laid flat it looks like this — four panels side by side, the round beginning at the back-left corner so that the inevitable colour jog lands on a corner where nobody looks.
A rectangle 30 cm by 20 cm, knitted sideways in garter stitch. Sideways is deliberate: it gives you one garter ridge per row along both long edges, and one ridge is exactly one picked-up stitch. That is what makes the arithmetic in the next step come out whole.
Garter makes one ridge every two rows, so 132 rows is 66 ridges. Count the ridges up one edge before you go any further: if you have 65 or 67, fix it now — every stitch count in the body depends on this number, and it is far easier to knit two more rows than to fudge a pick-up.
Then measure. Sixty-six ridges must come to 30 cm, because 66 picked-up stitches will: if your base is 32 cm long, the tube will be 30 cm wide and the base will pucker inside it. Ridges too loose, go down another needle size and knit the base again — it is two evenings, and it is the only part of this bag you can still cheaply redo.
Transfer the live stitches to the 80 cm circular needle. With the right side facing and the live stitches at the right-hand tip, work around the outside of the base:
Place the beginning-of-round marker where the back meets the live left-side stitches, and place a plain marker at each of the other three corners. Keep those corner markers in for the whole bag: they are how you will know, on round 96 of a charcoal tube, which panel you are looking at.
Knit one plain round in MC and count each panel against its marker: 44, 66, 44, 66. A pick-up that is one stitch out is trivial to correct now with a discreet increase or decrease at a corner, and impossible to correct once the panda is on it.
Stockinette all the way — every round is knit, because you never turn. The only event is the panda.
Cut the cream after round 139 and weave the end into the charcoal, not into the panda — a cream end darned through cream stitches on the inside will show as a thickened patch on the outside once the bag is blocked and stuffed.
Mark the chart's row 1 before you start and move a sticky note up as you go, but trust the knitting over the note: the panda is symmetrical about its centre, so if the two halves of a round do not mirror each other, you are on the wrong chart row. That check catches a misread round within one round, every time.
Twelve centimetres of plain tube, then a turning ridge and a facing that folds inside over a strip of canvas. The canvas is what makes the collar roll into a firm cylinder instead of slumping.
Fold the facing to the inside at the purl ridge, slide the 100 × 8 cm canvas strip in between, and slip-stitch the bound-off edge down. Overlap the ends of the canvas strip by 4 cm rather than butting them — a butt joint becomes a hinge, and the collar will fold there every time.
Forty-eight stitches wide — the panda's exact footprint, sitting directly below it. Knitted separately and sewn on, so the main tube is never interrupted.
Pin it to the front panel over stitches 54–101, with the ribbed opening at round 58 and the garter base at round 9, and mattress-stitch the sides and bottom down with a doubled length of MC. Leave the ribbed edge free — that is the opening.
Linen stitch: dense, flat, almost non-elastic, and it refuses to curl at the edges. It is still knitting, so it still creeps — which is why each strap is sewn onto a length of webbing that carries the actual load.
Cut two 95 cm lengths of webbing. Lay each strap face down, centre a webbing length on its wrong side with 70 cm under the knitting and 25 cm hanging free at the lower end, and backstitch along both edges of the webbing by hand or by machine, catching only the webbing and the purl bumps. The free tail is the anchor, and it goes into the base seam later.
One unbroken piece from the top of the back panel to the base. Two shorter pieces joined anywhere in between — even joined well — puts the entire load of the bag on that join, and it is the one repair you cannot make without unpicking the lining.
Cut five pieces. All measurements include a 1.5 cm seam allowance on every edge, so the finished lining is a 30 × 20 × 55 cm box — the same box the knitting makes.
| Piece | Cut | Finished | Number |
|---|---|---|---|
| Front & back | 33 × 58 cm | 30 × 55 cm | 2 |
| Sides | 23 × 58 cm | 20 × 55 cm | 2 |
| Base | 33 × 23 cm | 30 × 20 cm | 1 |
| Base stiffener | 28 × 18 cm | — | 1, in 3 mm polypropylene |
Sew the four walls into a tube, then set the base in. Press the seams open, turn 1.5 cm at the top edge to the wrong side and press. Slide the stiffener into the bottom — loose, not sewn in, so you can take it out to wash the bag.
| Short | Means |
|---|---|
MC | Main colour — the charcoal |
CC | Contrast colour — the cream |
k / p | Knit / purl |
sl1 wyif | Slip one stitch purlwise with the yarn held in front |
sl1 wyib | Slip one stitch purlwise with the yarn held behind |
rnd | Round — a full circuit of 220 stitches |
RS / WS | Right side / wrong side |
| Ridge | One garter ridge = two knitted rows |
Everything else is on the abbreviations table, and the techniques this pattern assumes — knitting in the round, gauge and blocking — each have their own lesson.
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