It's surprising what you can do with a wetsuit

Many moons ago my daughter carried a rucksack to school.  It hasn't seen much use recently.  So it was consigned to the back of the cupboard.

As she was due to go on a school trip to Paris recently, we went on a rucksack hunt. 

When we eventually unearthed it I noticed that for some reason the inner pocket had been cut out. 

But you can't go on a school trip with no inner pocket, I cried!  Where will you put your mobile phone without it getting bashed or rattling about at the bottom??

So I decided to make one.

As it turns out, I already had the perfect fabric with which to make a pocket - an old wetsuit!  Not only was it large enough to hold everything that it needed to, but it was also already padded.

It was easy enough to insert the zip although I would have liked to have been able to have topstitched it so that it was able to lay down a little flatter but the wetsuit was too darned boingy.

There was no way my sewing machine was going to go through two layers of wetsuit though - the needle kept bouncing off!  So I ended up handstitching the sides and top.  It was quite therapeutic actually. 

Here's the completed internal pocket.

And it certainly did what it was meant to do - no scratches or lost phones!