tote bags – eternal magpie

A tote bag experiment…

I sneaked a little something new onto the website last week – Miss Mouse & friends tote bags!

They’re made from 80% recycled cotton with 20% recycled polyester. They measure 37 x 43cm (so they’ll easily fit an A4 pad sideways), and they have a small gusset at the bottom so they’re not completely flat. The handles are 65cm long, so the bag will tuck neatly under your arm.

There are four designs, each on a different colour of bag, and they’re £15 each.
(If you’re a Patron at www.missmou.se or a subscriber to the mailing list, you should have a discount code.)

The tote bags are produced by a company called Stanley/Stella, who are based as far as possible on sound ethical principles. (I have a grumble about the fact that they don’t offer any plus sizes in their t-shirts, but that’s another story.)

They’re printed by Inkthreadable, who are a print-on-demand drop-shipping company. This means that you buy a tote bag, I confirm the order with Inkthreadable, and then they print it and send it straight out to you. It takes a few days – there’s no next-day delivery because it takes a while to do the printing. But if you order a bag, it should be with you inside a week.

I think this one’s my favourite – it makes me laugh to think about carrying a shopping bag with the Woodland Gang saving up their chocolate coins. Well, except for Pip – as usual!

Library Book Bag

I’ve been making this book bag for several months now, on and off. It was a request from my parents, to make them a nice sturdy bag that they could use to carry a little pile of hardbacks home from the library.

This is actually bag number two, as I somehow managed to get myself a bit confused with the measurements of the first one. For reasons I’m not quite clear on, it came out wide instead of tall. (No, I didn’t sew the pieces together the wrong way round. Honest.)

Thankfully I had enough fabric left over to make this second bag… and there’s still a piece big enough to make bag number three, just in case I’ve accidentally done something daft with this one as well!

This is what I’ve been up to:

I hope this doesn’t spoil a surprise for anybody whose gift hasn’t arrived in the post yet, but this is why I’ve been a little bit busy and stressed out over the past few weeks.

There’s only one item missing from the photo call, and that’s a hat that I knitted for Paul, mostly in the middle of the night. I ended up resorting to knitting it inside a carrier bag, when he arrived home earlier than I’d expected from his work leaving do! (Thankfully he was slightly drunk and far too tired to wonder what on earth I was doing.)

Most of these are gifts that I gave, but a few were things that I made to be given as gifts by other people.

Oh, and I did finish Bryan’s second sock, but I forgot to take a picture of the pair before I wrapped them up!

Three Blue Tote Bags

I’ve been making a lot of tote bags recently, mostly from recycled pillowcases and duvet covers.

Now that supermarkets are starting to charge for their plastic bags, more and more people are getting back into the idea of using fabric shopping bags. They’re strong, they can fold up neatly into your handbag, and they can hold a heck of a lot of shopping!

I was planning to write up a tutorial for making a tote bag from a standard pillowcase, but I see that the first issue of the new Sew Hip Magazine has beaten me to it.

I’ve seen similar tutorials online, for bags made from pillowcases and pretty tea towels. My bags use only half of a pillowcase, and they’re not lined, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t go to town and make yours enormous, or as fancy as you like!

Tag: tote bags

A tote bag experiment…

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Library Book Bag

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This is what I’ve been up to:

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Three Blue Tote Bags

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