Up-cycled Reusable Grocery Bag

Hi! Have I ever mentioned how much I like getting free stuff? Love it. Even though everyone's giving them away now, I still get excited when I get a free reusable grocery bag. Usually they come with the some company's logo on the front.

I actually kind of like the bike on this one, but we had a blue bag advertising for our city water treatment plant or something.  I figure, why walk around advertising for something I don't really care about (don't get me wrong, I like clean water...), when I can easily make it into a fun book bag that I really like? I turned the blue bag into a library bag for my boys, who are both Grover fans (who isn't, really?).

To cover the printed front I just cut and hemmed a piece of flannel and then hand stitched it along the bottom and sides. This made a large pocket. Add a piece of velcro in the middle of the top edge so that pocket doesn't gap and slump.  

I wanted the pocket to be on the inside of the bag, so I turned the bag inside out, to make both of the outsides blank (no print), and put the pocket inside. To make the face, I just printed out a coloring page of Grover, printing it at 150% or something to make it the size I wanted.

You can find Sesame Street coloring pages here. Most Sesame Street characters work well for this, because you only need some facial features and the right background color to make it look like the character. Yellow could be Big Bird or Burt, orange for Ernie, green for Oscar, red for Elmo...lots of possibilities. I cut out the eyes, nose and mouth, and used them as pattern pieces. I cut everything out of felt, then just pinned it in place and hand stitched it onto the bag. Here's what the inside looked like when I was done.

And here's the final product, big pocket inside, Grover face outside. Up-cycling something that was free to begin with is the best!

I hope you are having a good week!

Thanks for reading!
- Haley