Is your shopping cart worn out? Make it look like new again using old jeans!
Personal shopping carts are very useful for anyone who buys groceries in large quantities and/or who prefers to go to the shops on foot. These carts, therefore end up being used frequently, usually at least once a week for essential items. After a few years, however, the upholstery fabric of the cart can easily wear out, and the cart starts to look worn-out and ruined.
The solution is easy: keep the metal frame with the wheels and change the cloth basket / bag. And if you want to do this without spending anything, you can recycle old jeans. Denim jeans (but also other garments) are generally made of a highly resistant fabric that, if it is by now too faded to be worn, does not look bad at all when used to replace the lining on a shopping cart.
via Crear y Reciclar
Video tutorial via Crear y Reciclar/YouTube
We recommend the idea in a tutorial in which roughly three pairs of jeans were used to obtain all the fabric needed to reupholster a shopping cart.
You will need:
- jeans
- scissors
- a tape measure
- a strong needle and thread
- a thick piece of cardboard and a pencil
- a sewing machine (optional, but preferable)
How to proceed:
- Remove the old bag from the metal framework of the cart.
- Measure each part of the cart bag you want to replace: each side, the bottom and the covering flap. You can use the cardboard as a template to replicate the shapes of each side as described.
- Open the legs of the jeans by cutting along the longitudinal seam so as to obtain the largest possible pieces of the fabric. Do not throw away the thicker seam with stitches.
- With the help of the cardboard template, cut out the necessary pieces from the opened up jeans: if the cart you had was too small, now is the time to increase its measurements a little, perhaps by one or two centimeters. It might seem a little but it definitely adds volume.
- Even if you don't want to change the measurements, leave an extra 1 cm for each side and 6 cm for the top flap when cutting the shapes out.
- Assemble the cut parts together to recreate the various sides of the basket: you will find yourself having to join several pieces for each side, and the arrangement of each piece also helps to create a sort of "design"!
- Remember to always sew from the inside of the bag, so that the seams will remain inside and hidden. And use a zigzag stitch (or e a reinforcement stitch), especially for all the parts that will act as "corners".
- With the leftover jeans scraps, you can create edges (perhaps for the flap), or even cover the cart handle to make it softer to hold onto.
For more information, you can watch the video of this tutorial by clicking here.
