Recycled jeans

Clearing out my sewing room had the desired effect. I felt the pull of the sewing machine and spent a couple of hours converting an old pair of jeans into a bag!

I cut off the legs, then cut up the curve of the crotch seam a little way so that it will lie flat. Then I just sew across the opening.

I make a rough estimate of how big the lining needs to be and cut two rectangles of fabric - the important thing is for the top edge to be at least as wide as the waistband of the jeans, if not a little bigger. Too small and you're in trouble!

Sew the lining pieces together, put them inside the jean bag, and handsew around the top edges (I tried machine sewing the lining in once before, but denim is thick and you have the belt loops as hurdles too). The beauty is that you don't need to neaten off your seams as they are all enclosed.

The handle was a bit of an afterthought ... it was obvious from the mistakes I made in the process of making this bag that my skills are rusty. Ideally, the ends of the handles would have been hidden between the denim and the lining, but I added them on afterwards so I handsewed them on the outside.

As a little extra, I made a small bag from a pocket cut from a different pair of jeans. I liked that this pocket had a button down flap, so I cut around it, leaving about an inch of denim, then backed it with the lining fabric.

Do you have any more ideas of what I could make from that big pile of jeans?

I made this quilt a few years ago - I even incorporated a patch with a pocket in it that can hold a remote control!