I have been so busy that I haven’t updated my blog in a few weeks. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been sewing and crafting. Get ready for a lot of my recently completed projects to start showing up here in the next few days.
I love using reusable products and shopping bags are no exception. The volume of plastic bags we can accumulate in just one shopping trip is overwhelming. As an alternative I have made canvas bags, bought canvas bags, and I have used other old bags I had around the house as grocery bags. My newest bags came from old T-shirts. I am really enjoying them. I made a few out of XL T-shirts and they hold a lot of things. I filled one for our trip with 3 days worth of cloth diapers. Another one held a bunch of food and snacks. They worked very well, and were so fun to make.
Here is how they are made. I cut off the sleeves of the t-shirts. Then I cut out the neck. A suggestion I found was to lay about half of a good sized bowl at the top of the t-shirt and trace it. Then cut it out (go through both layers). However, I just winged it. The only sewing involved is to stitch the bottom of the t-shirt closed (Turn the t-shirt wrong side out first so that it will look better when you are finished sewing.)
The bag in the back of the above picture has 2 large quilts in it. I did that to show just how much will fit into a XL T-shirt bag. The bag was originally an XL T-shirt that I altered using the method listed above. The empty bags in front were XL T-shirts, but I cut the width a little bit to make them smaller. I had to stitch the sides and the bottom of those bags. A good sized T-shirt to use would be an adult small or a youth XL. That size of T-shirt made a more manageable sized bag, and would accommodate heavier items better.
The nice thing about these bags is that they are stretchy, made from shirts that I was just going to give to the Goodwill (so they are cheap), plus they can easily be washed with your regular laundry when they get dirty. I plan on making many more!
