Beach Bag from a Beach Towel

One of my daycare kids is celebrating their birthday this month. She loves dogs and the show "Paw Patrol", so I headed out the other night to get her a present ... hopefully dog related. I was in luck! There was a huge shipment of beach towels just arrived at the store I visited, all with cartoon themed pictures. Of course, they had Paw Patrol, so I scooped one up. This girl's family has a pool, so I figured it would be a nice little gift. But I wanted to add something to it.

I saw this idea on Pinterest and decided to do something similar.

 I only needed to look at the photo to decide how I was going to work mine. I didn't see the need to use two towels as this person did, and I didn't want to go to the fuss and bother of the border. I also changed the bulky towel handles for some cotton fabric. For a three-year old, I was going for simplicity.

I have some very heavy printed cotton, more like a canvas. I used this cotton to make pockets on one end quarter of the towel, and a pillow casing on the opposite end quarter. I made a lightly stuffed pillow out of muslin and inserted it into the case. This way the pillow can be removed when the towel needs washing. I left an opening in the case for this purpose. The handles are sandwiched in between the towel and the pockets. 

pillow insert

The towel can be laid down on the ground to lie on, and when you're finished with it, you just fold it over three times, bring the handles together and you have a small bag with pockets on the outside to carry a few essentials with you.

Fold over once, twice, three times and then sideways!

As I worked on this, I thought of all sorts of details that could be added to this idea.  Apart from embellishments of ribbons and trims, a zippered pouch might be handy for the beach and different sized pockets to hold a magazine and sunscreen. For this gift I left it fairly simple. 

Because I restrict myself to gifts for the kids between $10 - $15, I didn't put anything in the pockets. But I would have loved to add some little flip flops (also in the stores now), a sun hat and a colouring book and crayons. This cost me just the beach towel ($15) as I already had the fabric and the stuffing. It took me about three hours to make this from start to finish, so a fairly quick and easy project.

Thanks for stopping by!

Wendy