The fold-away shopping bag project

I have been playing around with a pattern for a fold-away shopping bag. It has a gusset in the side like those plastic carrier bags you get at the supermarket which makes it a lovely roomy bag for carrying your groceries about it.

I used this lovely brown decorator-weight curtain fabric I had in my stash. The edges at the top of the bag are finished with bias binding and it has this little flap which closes the top up a bit.



It’s a good sturdy bag which folds up into this neat little pouch-like thing when you don’t need it. Cute, huh?



I used poppers set with my Pyrm Vario pliers. I wasn’t sure how much strain the fabric would take with these poppers in so I sewed small squares of fabric on the reverse sides to reinforce the closure points before setting my poppers in. I’m rethinking the closures and looking at other possibilities like self-cover buttons and an elastic loop or even sew-in poppers.



I’ll work out the wee issues I have with this bag before turning out a tutorial.

It’s the long August Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK with Monday 30 August being a bank holiday for us. A bank holiday is a public holiday and this one held on the last Monday in August is the last bank holiday before Christmas and the last one before the start of the school year. Local schools in my area will resume for the new academic year next week. Mr Crafty Ady and I are taking DinoBoy and Missy Moo on a day trip to the Butterfly Farm in Stratford-Upon-Avon tomorrow. DinoBoy has been before and he’s very excited. Missy Moo is very excited too and was loudly reciting the animals she hopes to see tomorrow (including giraffes, lions, elephants, tigers and snakes). She will be sorely disappointed as it is just a butterfly farm – so the only creatures we’ll see are butterflies, other bugs and arachnids.

Have a wonderful weekend, friends.