I hope each and everyone of you are safe and healthy. I thought of sharing with you another project I worked on some time ago.

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Last year I made myself a The Jack Tar by Merchant & Mills* which is a bucket bag pattern. Here* is a link to my post on Minerva’s Blogger Network where I talked about my impressions at the time about this bag.

However, I’ve found myself avoiding to use it especially after the snaps holding the leather strap came loose and fell of. I meant to fix it, but before I did so, I inspected the snaps and decided that the leather strap is too thick and would never secure the strap.

Upcycling is not really something that I do. I much rather start from scratch rather than make alterations or upcycle. To be fair, this is more like repairing the bag to it does not get thrown away. I was not too fond of the round bottom either. After debating whether or not to give up on this bag and throw it away (it did not seem good enough to gift or sent to the charity shop), it was more sensible to try and find a way to fix it.

It occured to me that the leather strap could be removed completely and have it replaced with a chain.

As for the bottom, I unpicked the round bottom out and sewed up the bottom seam and boxed the corners on both the lining and the outer shell. (I wrote a little tutorial – here – on how I box the corners in on lined bags so that the lining is attached to the outer shell).

I am much happier with my bag not that I made this changes to it, I think I’ll even make a few more of these altered Jack Tarr bags in different colours and might even replace the snap with a zipper with a few more modifications.

As I did not pay attention to the little label I had attached to the outside pocket, this fell victim to the scissors, as it got caught in the corner stitching, but apart from that my new bag is perfect.