Fabric Covered Retro Suitcase

My stepmom has been diligently working at cleaning up their lives and getting rid of things. Simplifying. Not leaving piles of unnecessary things for the kids to go through some day. While slightly morbid to think about, it’s completely practical. Having to clean out my aunt Eleanor’s estate a few years ago with my sister, whom I don’t think ever threw a thing out in her entire life, I can appreciate this philosophy.

As a part of this purging she brought over two old suitcases for me to look at. One I decided to keep, and the other I told her to continue on to the junkyard with.

I had seen a pin on Pinterest recently of a really cute retro suitcase and I thought I could do something similar to this one.


As I’m sitting here writing this post, I went onto Pinterest to find the photo on my board, and clicked through to the link for the first time. It was on a cute blog called Sew Can Do. She did it a little differently, but the end result seemed to be the same. I think her suitcase was a little cooler than mine was, and her fabric was terrific. She used Modge Podge to adhere the fabric to the case, and also sealed it with matte Modge Podge. This is a great idea and I think I’m going to do that tonight to mine.

First I cleaned the suitcase up using 409 cleaner. Then I roughly measured fabric for the front, back, and sides and ironed on a medium-weight fusible interfacing to the wrong side of the fabric. Then I used some craft paper and drew a pattern for the top and bottom. These were the easy parts. The sides were much more difficult because of all the hardware. I used Beacon Adhesives Fabri-Tac glue to adhere the fabric to the suitcase.

I thought it came out great. It’s a cute way to store things, or maybe even use it as a suitcase again? I’d be the most stylish person at the airport.