So, we recently discovered that our local grocery store would give us money off our grocery bill if we brought in our own bags to stuff our purchases in. Now, we’re pretty good at “going green” – we recycle and it’s pretty much habit now to separate our trash as we go along, we carpool, and we try to remain conscientious about what we’re doing to reduce our carbon footprint and output.

Don’t get me wrong, we aren’t “tree huggers” either – but I do think we try more than your average bear.

But grocery bags never were something we really put much thought into. We usually go for paper bags (I know, they cut down trees to make them – but at least they are recyclable in more ways than one), but we do have a stash of the icky plastic ones. Then my hubby found out about the $ off if we bring our own bags.

So, I started looking for ideas on what to do. The ones the grocery store offered for sale were…well let’s face it. They’re butt-ugly. And small. We would have to buy twice as many bags as we would normally use to make up for what we get. I’ve been sewing since I was a kid, so hey, I decided to make them.

After a bit of planning, I found this tutorial on making a nice, lined grocery tote bag. It was an excellent tutorial, however, the bag ended up pretty small, and quite frankly, the gussets and seams were pretty thick. At first, I thought it was the fabric I was using – but I used basically two very old pillowcases I had lying around – standard “quilting fabric” thickness. The lady on that tutorial actually used a heavier weight fabric – so I couldn’t imagine it.

The "normal" side of the bag, as defined by my husband.

But I liked the idea.

So what I did was take apart one of our paper grocery bags to use as the basis of the pattern. After that, it was basically nothing more than sewing straight lines – it was pretty darn quick to blow through, actually. Initially, I thought it would be too heavy (again with the huge, thick seams) but I had already purchased the fabric and we figured it couldn’t hurt to go ahead and see what happened. What happened was a very sturdy bag. I wanted to used felled seams, but ended up just using a straight stitch. We tested the strength by loading up every canned good we had in the house (and we had a LOT) into the bag and lifted it, swung it around, etc. to see what would happen – and nothing. It held fast without the handles or bottom seam tearing out.

The "wrong side" of the bag, as defined by my husband (presumably
because it's "too girly")

As you can see, though, it’s a nice bag. I bought fabric that had different patterns, but were complimentary to each other. It’s fully reversible so you can decide which pattern you want on the outside and which on the inside, and when (or if) they get dirty, we can just toss them in the wash.

I’m about to make 5 or 6 more of these puppies, and since this one turned out so well, I thought perhaps I’d share how I did it so you all can benefit from it, too. So I’ll follow up later after I’ve made some more (and this time, I’ll take pictures along the way so some of the stuff I describe will have visuals to help explain) and then post the full “how to” when it’s all ready. I’ve posted Step One of the Tutorial already! But I just wanted to show it off, because it really did turn out very nicely!