Blazer to Diaper Bag Refashion

This has to be my favorite challenge project. Ever. Sure, there are a couple that come close… but of all the challenge projects I’ve done, this has come out the closest to my vision, perhaps even turning out better. Plus, it is something that I’ll use every day.

This was a challenge project for the new Refashion Files blog. I had to take an existing something, refashion it… and the keyword for this challenge was “rainbow.”

I went to my closet to see what I had that was rainbow, or that could be made rainbow. My eyes fell on an old floral blazer. I bought this blazer back when I worked corporate, and had to wear suits. It was nice and large, since it had been bought to help cover my pregnant belly during my first pregnancy. I thought there would be enough fabric to refashion it into a purse. No… a diaper bag!

What would be more fitting to complete my transition from working-mom to work-at-home-mom than transforming a blazer from my corporate life into a diaper bag? How about transforming TWO blazers into a diaper bag? It turned out there wasn’t enough of the floral-rainbow blazer to make a diaper bag, so I grabbed a red blazer to use as lining/accent.

I wasn’t comfortable trying to design a whole bag from scratch, so I modified a bag pattern that I had used before, was comfortable with, and love. The 241 Tote by Noodlehead. I printed out the pattern pieces, and then added both width and depth to turn this roomy tote into a big diaper bag.

After a couple hours with my seam ripper, I had turned the blazers into flat(ish) pieces, and I cut out all my pattern pieces. I placed some strategically to take advantage of existing design elements, and to pay homage to the origins of the new diaper bag.

You can see at the top of the red fabric, the original pocket from the red blazer. This also gave me an extra pocket on each side of the bag, with no extra work. At the bottom, you can see the original seam from the back of the blazer, which mirrors the new seam on the tote.

The inside is super-roomy. I used some fabric I had on-hand to create interior pockets. A zippered pocket, two side pockets (made the same way the side pockets are made on the outside of the bag), and a large pocket along one side of the bag. This makes for an awesome EIGHT pockets on this bag!

Since I had both blazers and the pocket fabric on-hand, all I had to purchase was a magnetic snap, 2 D-rings, and interfacing. I used mid-weight interfacing throughout, and then added Soft N Stable on the two large sides of the bag to give it more stability.