What to do with an unrepairable tent?

Back in 2022, I bought a new-to-us tent - it arrived looking in excellent condition, but it quickly became apparent that all the white portions of the fly were perished.  They looked fine, but ripped on very minimal stress, and the rips weren't really mendable due to the fragility of the fabric :-(

I cut it up, and was left with some blue waterproof fabric from the fly, some heavy-duty waterproof fabric from the floor, and a fine mesh from the inner.

What to do with it all?

The floor was easiest to figure out: it's now the backing of a cat-themed picnic blanket (which was, to my delight, 100% made of recycled materials, if you don't count the actual sewing thread).

The fine mesh, I was much less sure what to do with.

Eventually I cut out 6 'vegie bags' to use now that plastic vegie bags are harder to come by.  I like the way they're so much more robust than the plastic ones but have found that, being mesh, they're less air-tight, which isn't so good for storing cut vegies.  I started these in August 2023 and only finished the last one this weekend!  A lot of this year I haven't been sewing due to the concussion, and when I was these needed to fit in around other projects with actual deadlines.

 

As well as the 6 white ones, there's one slightly bigger black vegie bag with a much coarser mesh - it's made of the tent's inner door, as is handy for big things like the monster cauliflowers we sometimes get from the Avondale market.

I also cut and hemmed two big circles, which have been fantastic for straining cordials and are getting a fair bit of use at the moment :-)

Some of the scraps around them have been used to make four triangular cheesecloths, which are currently getting a lot of use in my revitalised chickpea milk cheese experiments :-)

I also made two new mesh bags for my water kefir, as my previous ones were in a pretty dire state after near-constant use for some years!

Between the straining cloths, cheesecloths and water kefir bags I had a lot of small mesh things to store in a kitchen drawer - I decided to make a bag from the same fabric to store them in.

I was almost out of the mesh fabric when someone mentioned reusable tea bags to me.  I'd never heard of such a thing, but when I looked into them I thought they might be convenient to add to our camping supplies.  I've now made four as a gift as well as one for me, breaking out some of my 'fun' buttons for the project :-)

After all of that, this is all that's left of the tent inner!  (Dessert spoon for scale).  Maybe enough to make another kefir bag or a teabag or two, but not much else!

There's a surprising amount of fabric in even a small tent, it seems!  And I still have all the blue portions of the fly to use next time I need something waterproof.

And, after finding the tent I'd bought to be such a dud, we've ended up revitalising our old one.  Here it is at Shakespear Regional Park back in September.  It works so well for us, and all that was wrong with it was that the waterproofing on the seams had died, so I looked into how hard it would be to fix that.  I was able to find quite inexpensive iron-on waterproof tape, Martin spent an hour or two applying it, and it seems to be doing just fine again.  Hurrah!