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!