Craft Insanity: Day-board cooler

This is one of the most useful projects I have made for myself so far. I have food allergies that make it difficult at best to eat at events. I usually bring my own food rather than drive the feast o crat nuts trying to accommodate my food restrictions. I also try to only bring containers that don't need to be hidden at an event. I have a lovely basket man basket that we keep all our feast gear in. My husband built a wooden box that had insulation foam and a plastic bin to use as a cooler but the plastic broke and the box was way too heavy for me to bring to an event by myself. I needed a small cooler that was big enough to carry all my food and drink for myself and still be small enough for me to easily carry to an event that I was going to by myself.

I found these great little coolers that I thought would work out for me just fine. I decided that if I was going to make a fabric cover for the cooler, why not add pockets that could hold the feast gear for 1 person as well. Below is the result of dayboard cooler experiment. I really like how it turned out. They only thing I might do differently is that the cooler tends to peak out at the top, so I would either need to make the cooler bag taller or make the top wrap around more to cover the cooler better.

This is the cooler and all the feast gear I wanted to be able to carry with me to an event.

This is the outer fabric of the cooler cover. I have this weird addiction to quilting fabric so you see it here on batting so that I can quilt it using a simple diamond pattern.

this is the lining of the cooler cover which was also the initial pattern pieces I cut out to make sure it would cover the cooler completely.

Sewing the mug holder strap. The camouflage tape you see on my sewing machine is a guide like I use for when I am quilting. It keeps me from having to draw diagonal lines in chalk over the whole piece I am working on.