DIY re-styled fabric tote bag |Keeping it Real

Hello, and welcome! Today I'm showing you here today how I re-styled a fabric tote bag.

While it's true I like to make my own bags (check my 20-minutes lined tote bag tutorial), I also use store bought bags once in a while. In this case. I actually received a free tote bag when I ordered some items online - but it came with the brand name in bold black letters, plus a printed design I really didn't like. But it was sturdy and perfectly sized, so I decided to give it a new look...

This is the bag I started with (I'm blanking the original design printed on the front of the bag):

Because the image and the letters were mostly black, I started by covering them with a layer of white acrylic paint, just to make sure the darker print would not show through the fabric I wanted to cover it with:

(when doing this, always place a cardboard of a sheet of plastic inside your bag, to make sure the paint doesn't bleed onto the other side)

Then I cut a piece of batting in the size required to entirely cover the original print and started sewing a series of small pieces of fabric (scraps and leftovers from other projects) to the batting. When that was done, I sewed it to the original bag:

I also added a pocket inside (made in a similar way):

The pocket has a plastic snap to keep it closed, and to cover a more of the original black print that showed through the inside of the bag, I also added a bit of additional fabric and matching lacy ribbon:

And finally, the last step was to sew a lacy ribbon all around the fabric added to the front of the bag (I was out of the green ribbon I used on the pocket by now, so I added a similar one in pink):

All in all, it was a pretty fun project. Now not only I have a much prettier bag, but I also used up a lot of small fabric scraps that would otherwise probably have ended in the thrash bin.

In this case, I already had a bag I wanted to re-style, but you can always do something similar with a blank canvas bag, and it's a wonderful (and useful) handmade gift idea.

And yes, I did make a matching zipper pouch - I'll post about it soon too!