Make Your Own Grocery Bags!

Using your own grocery bags has always been a way to reduce your plastic consumption—but now that Montgomery County has a five-cent tax on every plastic bag you use, there’s extra incentive!

Luckily, you don’t have to go out and buy reusable bags—you can make them yourself! And when you do, they can be a lot more fun, interesting and personal than the ones that you can buy at the grocery store check out line. In fact there’s lots of ways you can make your own bags, just by using items that are already in your closet.

The great thing about making bags is that you can use pretty much any type of fabric you want, as long as it is sturdy enough to hold the items that you want to put in it. You can sew the bottom of a t-shirt together to make a bag. You can cut off the legs of your pants and use the top to make a bag.

Pictured here, you can see a pair of jeans that were turned into a tote bag (along with two smaller bags that were made out of cargo pants and a shirt, repsectively), and another pair of pants with a fun print that were turned into a bag using similar methods. You can combine elements of different pieces of clothing, such as jeans and corduroys (see picture).

My favorite pair of pants I made into a bag, which I unfortunately don’t have a picture of, I sewed together the bottom of the legs of a pair of pants. They were embroidered, so it made a very pretty pattern, with very little effort on my part.

You can also make bags pretty easily with fabric that isn’t your old clothes. A basic tote bag is a good beginning sewing project. You can start with just a rectangular piece of fabric folded over, and sewn along the edges. You might want to square off the corners, add straps, and a lining. The black and red bag pictured here has those features. Or, you can make it reversible, like the black and green tote, pictured twice here.

You might want to sew a more complicated bag with a rectangular base, and some reinforcement. Or extra pockets. The possibilities are endless!

But you actually don’t even have to sew to make your own bags—you can draw inspiration from the Japanese art of furoshiki. In this method, you can tie knots in wrapping cloths to make your bags, without sewing anything at all. And while you can buy special Japanese wrapping cloths… pretty much anything you have in your closet will work for that too!