Eevee Backpack

The first step was picking fabrics nicely suited in color and texture.

For Eevee, I wanted to evoke the cozy look and feel of a latte, with soft cream blending on top of a slightly stronger brown.

I already had some cream sweater knit from a previous sweater that seemed perfect for the fluffy cloud like bits, and I chose a chocolate corduroy for the main body.

The in-game texture isn't explicitly corduroy, but on close inspection there are faint lines that suggest it. Even if the material were different in game, I still would have likely chosen corduroy because it feels the most suited for a cute yet classy book bag.

The next step was vectoring out the design from the concept art sheet I wanted to use as a base, adjusting points and curves until they matched up closely with the reference.

While flat concept art doesn't translate directly* into a usable pattern, I wanted to have this printed out to make sure that when I started cutting fabric I'd have a good idea of the relative scale of all the pieces.

*some pieces translated more directly than others. The tail I was able to sew largely as-is; whereas the shoulder straps I had to completely redraft from hand, but vectoring them did provide me an appropriate width for them so that they didn't look too large or small compared to Eevee's hands and feet.

This backpack marked my first time embroidering (Chiaki's bag had a iron-on face, and I wanted something with more texture)

For my test run (seen to the left), I was mostly happy with the form, but not the consistency, which prompted me to pull up a guide on how to properly execute what I had in mind.

Searches for Leaf and Fishbone stitches netted me the results I wanted, and helped me be cleaner on my next attempt, namely this video I used as visual reference. 

The trial run also taught me not to embroider the corduroy ears diagonally, as it was both harder to find a center line, and the front and back of the ears looked funky when they met at an angle.

Also referenced in the video above Back-stitching also helped a lot when creating the outline (left image, right ear), as I was able to guide the needle better when it always went into the marker on the backside first and then on the front I would simply return to the previous exit point, rather than having to guess where on the front was closest to the marker on the back.

I followed the same leaf stitches for the black pupils, and then on top of them in one quadrant I did the same for the white glare spots.

I used a similar stitch for the nose, stitching out a triangle and then alternating diagonals to fill across the horizontal line.

Lastly I back stitched the mouth, and then went back over it a few times in a spiral to thicken it, stitching from directly above the existing line to directly below it and vice versa.

This completed the embroidery and gave me the texture I noted I was missing from Chiaki.

Embroidery done, the next phase is to start constructing the full bag.

It's important to note upfront that every single piece of corduroy I used in the backpack was flatlined to some of the sweater fabric, even the non-visible parts like the inside of the ears, tails, and straps.

This is for multiple reasons, mainly for reinforcing the structure and for giving a softer cushiony feel to the inside of the backpack. It also protects the backside of the embroidery from being directly picked at, and helps the stuffed pieces retain a bit more of their shape.

Also, as shown in this ear pic, unless otherwise noted, all of the seams are finished with a zigzag stitch, and the curves are clipped into (to allow them to fold better), and those seams are all then pressed, which I won't mention during the remainder of the thread to avoid redundancy.

As I mentioned when talking about the vectoring stage, the tail was largely "as-is" from its 2D design, where I made two brown teardrop shapes, then made tan shapes covering about half of them with three curves, topstitched the tan to the brown, and then stitched the two pieces together normally, leaving enough room to invert the tail and fill with polyfill, and then the open area at the top was stitched closed.

The curves were similar to a Celeste Animal Crossing hoodie I had made (which in turn was inspired by Random Tuesday's Blathers), which was also topstitched, so it was a familiar shape to deal with.

I had initially wanted to hide my zipper under the neck cushion, but the aforementioned thickness issues in that area meant there was no way I would have been able to do that cleanly with those straps in the same location, so I instead opted to move it to the top of the backpack, which worked out for the best because it allowed a larger zipper and more capacity in my backpack.

I stitched out a rectangle to act as finishing, cut it out, and sewed my zipper to the new edges it formed.

The last portion was making the large fluffy straps. While I had a rough idea of how I wanted them to behave, the exact logistics of them were my last big challenge to overcome, as they were mapping a complex 3D shape into a 2D pattern.

The whiteboard design was the rough idea in my head- in addition to the cushion snapping to the shoulder strap, it also needed to snap to itself to subtly complete a loop.

This was also how the final design worked, but the exact shape to be properly butterfly/bread dough-esque took some workshopping, as the initial draft would have resulted in the strap being flat on one side.

The image to the left is showing what the folded over pieces look like before attaching.

The left and right sides of the hourglass attaches to the same sides of the rectangle;

The rectangle is then folded into a tri-fold, and the top/bottom parts of the hourglass that don't overlap the rectangle are sewn to the parts of the hourglass they do overlap.

(i.e. the overhang on the bottom in the front and back is sewn together to itself)