To celebrate today, the first day of Spring, I decided to dive head first into Spring cleaning. For me, this is less about actually cleaning things, and more about getting rid of all the extra junk laying around that no one ever uses or wears or cares about anymore.  It stresses me out to be surrounded by a lot of clutter and nothing feels better than making it all go away.  I usually do this in one of four ways:

1. I sell things I no longer use or wear on Ebay and on Facebook yardsale groups
2. I give things away to friends or donate items to my local thrift store
3. I take a damaged item and find a new use for it, or salvage a useful part of it
4. Worst case scenario – I throw things away

Today, I came across something in my closet that I never wear anymore – My University of Idaho Marching Band hoodie.  I got this from the one season I played in the Vandal Marching Band during grad school. It was a fun semester, and a fun band to be a part of.

This is the kind of item that makes spring cleaning challenging.  I couldn’t donate it, even though it was in excellent condition.  Who in New Hampshire would want or buy a used marching band hoodie from Idaho?  I also couldn’t sell it or give it away.  Even if I found someone from the trumpet section from that particular band season, they wouldn’t want it, because my name was on the back.

However, being a sentimental person, I couldn’t just throw it in the trash.  I decided to try to make it into something more useful.  This is what I ended up with:

These drawstring backpacks are probably one of the easiest sewing projects you can do. All you really need to do is stitch your hoodie into a pillowcase shape and add a couple grommets at the bottom for the drawstrings.  The only tricky thing I did with this project was rearranging some of the parts. The front of the hoodie is the front of the bag. However, I wanted to include the pouch pocket so I sewed the back of the hoodie to the pouch and made that the back of my bag.  For the top of the bag, where the drawstrings pull it shut, I used the waistband of the hoodie. In the process of rearranging all these pieces I lost a few words from the back of the hoodie.  Now it awkwardly reads, “Trumpet. You’re welcome.”  Aside from that, I think it turned out well.

Here is the final product, front and back:

Now what should I do with the other 10 hoodies in my closet???