More picnic upcycling ...

Erin's picnic project was the catalyst for more pleasant upcycling.  

I'd made several high school art cases for her, around 12 years ago.  

I've used the purple-trimmed pencil roll in my beverage case for ages.  It holds various teaspoons and some other items.  Now the green case is Erin's picnic cutlery roll.  (The rainbow ribbons were the girls' hair ribbons from primary school).

The autumn floral lino tool case was folded differently and modified slightly to become storage for Erin's cheese serving set. 

I've recently been enjoying some hand-sewing and enjoyed slow-stitching the new geometric ribbon tie to the upcycled cheese tool case. 

I also made a cover for a picnic salad bowl - which was a lot easier than I expected! 

The salad servers were last to be housed.  After pondering I decided on a padded case for those, using some pre-quilted fabric from the stash (which I probably had since before Erin was born)!

I quilted over the original fabric, using several of the fabrics that feature on her other picnic items - along with a few other choices.  (Erin isn't big on matchy-matchy but had specified bright and cheerful).

Re-usable rainbow metal straws are accommodated in a lightly padded pencil case(ish) zip pouch.  The bird print was part of a 50c remnant - and also features on the upcycled library bag.

I'm really pleased with how all the pieces look together.  It's definitely a fun, happy theme - which was the aim.  Of course, it's nice to be able to upcycle some favourite items as well.

Now we just need to test it all with a proper picnic!

Picnic upcycle ...

I mostly keep track of my sewing projects in a personal FB album but even so, there are items I made long before social media was ever a thing.  Yep, really!

When my girls were in primary school, I made each of them a library bag.  The bags were quite similar, they just had different coloured stitching around the applique, which also matched the colour of the straps.  Those two library bags were my first-ever totes!

Erin has hung onto hers all these years and recently requested it be upcycled into something more useful (as she has other, newer bags for her craft work). 

There was a lot of pondering and lengthy discussion before deciding on the bag's transformation. She was putting together a picnic set and wanted a bag to store plates, which were too large to fit inside her cute picnic basket.

I took the library bag apart and washed it.  Erin then had fun spray-bleaching the denim outer, trying to disguise some of the fading - while being careful not to damage the bright bird applique.  

After the bleaching, there were still darker areas, so I replaced the original straps with similar (decorative) dark blue webbing.  

Once I'd decided to make a large zip pouch, the rest of the upcycle was quite straight forward. I had a bright green zip in the stash, which worked well with the original bird print.

I'd picked up a different bright bird print at an op-shop on a road-trip, so used that as part of the revamp, together with a scrap of macaw fabric.  

In funny co-incidence, I was using Erin's macaw ruler when measuring during various stages of the upcycle!  

I'd taken very rough measurements of the plates before starting but really, the fact that the pouch fit snugly on top of the basket was a marvellous fluke!

Here's hoping the "new" picnic bag does most excellent work for another 20-plus years!