grocery bags

My children don't have many chores. They are one and four, almost two and five. Their weekly chore is doing the recycling. Their daily chores are making their beds and clearing the dishes from the table. Thor needs to be supervised. He is, uh, ambitious, yes, rather excited about recycling. My husband supervised last week, and by supervise I mean of course brought the bin from outside to the inside, then walked away. After the children filled the bin, he put it back outside. Apparently, the children threw away all of our canvas bags for food shopping, a dust pan and brush, and the lid for our recycling bin.

That is soooo not the point of bringing your own canvas bags to the market. I even had produce bags in there. Four of our bags were ones that said "Yingst Family Market. Est. 2006." Our family name and the year we married. And the other three were ones that zipped into a convenient little pouch and the money they cost went to feed African children. Those were incredibly convenient too. I found one, being used for books, and a produce bag.

I used the grocery bag as a template for some new ones. I am terrible at sewing, as I am just learning the art of consistently pressure on my sewing pedal. And what all these dang stitches are for. My husband was embarrassed that he wasn't watching the children, so he said, Hey, there is a big piece of canvas in the garage. I found it a few years ago from the previous owners, I will wash it for you.

So, he did. And it was hella large. I didn't measure it, but I did use it for new bags.

There is virtually no overhead for this project. Just thread and manpower. I admit that sewing isn't particularly something I am good at. My seams are crooked, and uneven.  But here were my first two. They are a little too large, I think.

I covered an ugly seam with some fabric, and made it into a courier type bag because I often ride to the farmer's market in the summer, and wanted something that wouldn't open.

Then I made some smaller ones experimenting with stitches and seams.

I was using different seam techniques, and did one with a contrasting thread, but the problem is that I cannot sew straight as a matter of course, so the contrasting thread is very very visible. Or rather, my mistakes are VERY visible. So, I hit the fabric shop yesterday and found this cool native american ribbon and sewed it on top of the crappy seam, and it looks better. Much better. Going to do it on the other one too.

Crappy seam.

Awesome ribbon covering crappy seam.

I still have more than half my canvas left, so I might research how to make the ones with the zipper on them, and create a few of those. I also am going to figure out how to make produce bags, because those are damn useful.