Make your own grocery bag

More and more we try to avoid taking our groceries home in plastic bags. It’s bad for the environment and frankly, most of them aren’t all that pretty either, right?

It’s so much better to carry your own fabric bag, one you can take with you over and over again. You can use fabrics of your own choice and you can even match them to your coat or outerwear. Make a fashion statement if you will!

Not only for groceries

The bag you need, has to be big enough though for all your groceries. It’s a hassle to have to deal with a bunch of smaller bags. That’s why I make my own grocery bags. I’ve made a few in the past. They serve not only during my grocery shopping but they are useful as well when I go shopping in the city with my family or friends.

Sew a reusable market bag

The pattern I love most is one from Anna Graham aka Noodlehead from her book “Handmade Style”. I can highly recommend the book, it has so many lovely and useful projects. Unfortunately, when I wrote this article the book was sold out. Hopefully, she will issue it again.

In any case, you can always search Pinterest for a free tote bag pattern and apply my idea to the free pattern.

Design your own “fabric”

The bag Anna made has a calm background in a pieced striped design, but you can replace the surface with any pre-made design.

So for my bag, I made my own fabric piece and used a mix of the More Background Even More Paper low volumes, together with some black and black textured fabrics. After making a good bunch of Half Square Triangles (measuring 2” x 2” each), 144 to be precise, I created a pattern with them. I was going for a mountain-ish design. What do you think, did I succeed?

Put your market bag together

After I pieced together my fabric for the bag, making it a bit larger to fit the bag’s template, I quilted my piece using straight lines before cutting the pieces needed for the bag. After this was all done, it was just following the instructions Anna wrote to put the bag together.

For the handles, I had a couple of nice black leather ones which were perfect to make this bag complete.

Materials, the sky’s the limit

Do you wanna give this bag a try? All you need is a couple of low volumes, ideally using a Fat Quarter bundle or a couple of Fat Eighths from my new line. Also, you need some lovely textured black fabric or even better a variety of black textured fabrics.

Make your bunch of Half Square Triangles and put them together according to the layout here and you’ll get the same mountain-ish pattern as my bag has. Be sure to make it large enough for your pattern pieces to fit and follow the instructions of the bag pattern you’re using.

Of course, you can play around with all kinds of fabrics. Try a more colored approach by replacing the blacks using the Dance in Paris blues or greens. Or what about the Quotation collection’s greens or oranges? Just make sure your fabrics for the mountains are dark enough to let them pop.

Show me your bag!

If you make a bag with my surface design, I would love to see it. Tag me @zenchicmoda on Instagram when it’s finished!

Happy sewing!