Adaptive reuse

The horses and the chickens keep wanting to eat and all, and so the plastic feed bags keep stacking up at the barn. Sure, i wish they still packaged feed in printed cotton bags that i could make into garments and quilts, but if plastic is all i'm going to get around here, why not make use of it? Time to convert them into totes!

I made a few of these at Christmastime, and this one went to the silent auction for the Bluemont dance program. (I already had four prints going to different auctions that week, it was time for something different!)

There are a zillion tutorials out there if you have a regular influx of bags; a lot of them use the bits trimmed from the bag to make handles, but i've found that cotton webbing is less hassle and gives a much nicer result (yeah, and also i got a whole reel of it at a thrift shop for about the cost of a single yard, so it's not adding much to my cost at the moment). I've been sewing these on the Rocketeer that i bought back in August, a machine i had intended to clean up and sell... but i keep going back and using it for projects, under the guise of "testing," so i'm starting to think it's probably here to stay.