Backpack finished!

I'm in a very celebratory mood today, finally I have something to show for all the work I've been putting into this unit!

May I present to thee my finished carnival backpack:

It may not look like much, but a lot of work went into this baby!   This photo's from today's fitting, which went really well.  It fits Immie like a glove, and the unitard fits just fine as well (no zipper in yet though, hence the pinned up back seam!).  I have since made a few minor adjustments, like adding an extra bolt through the bottom of the mdf, and a couple of extra plastazote wedges underneath the aluminium strips.   But anyhoo, tis done now, and that's a real load off my mind.  Now for the complicated part, the puppet structure!

P.S.  I may be nice and post a tutorial for this at some point.  During my own research on backpacks the complete lack of information available over the internet was EXTREMELY irritating.  Thankfully I went to a workshop with Kinetika where I was able to see a couple of their examples, as well as getting a few pages of instructions that I followed to a certain extent.  It's been quite interesting for those of us working on this project to see how differently each of our backpacks have turned out according to our particular design.