Green grocery bags

These are the bags I made for the competition of Kotiliesi women's magazine. Or to be exact, the first one was made some years ago for a recycling exhibition. One pair of trousers, one pyjama bottom (black) and two T-shirts (brown and yellow), and a little piece of a green T-shirt.



This used to be my nightgown:



This was a men's shirt, the bag's name is Melka:




And this was a young man's summer shirt with low set pockets, from H&M. The bag is called Mauritz.

I have machine stitched the button lists so that no shopping will drop out between the buttons. The last three bags are all small enough to keep in a handbag or even a jacket pocket. But also big enough for some shopping: I packed the bags with a 4 roll package of toilet paper and a 1.5 litre bottle when I took the photos.

There is no news about the competition yet, it was maybe more just a challenge to give ideas. I hope many people have taken the challenge and there will be less plastic bags on the dump!

Apron and tablecloth

Today I finally finished this apron I promised to make for Kaija's birthday in April. It will look a lot nicer on her. The narrow stripes hurt your eyes only in the photo, not is real life. I'm in disguise here wearing a navy striped T-shirt; I really never wear blue. Well, almost never. Six years ago I bought a light blue linen blouse.



The DNP tablecloth has a binding now, but has not yet been ironed. I think I can count 2.4 m fabric used for the tablecloth (top, flannel and backing), and 0.9 m for the apron. I must make a bookkeeping system for my fabric diet!



Yesterday I also started a new project. My sister Maija e-mailed me about a competition in a Finnish women's magazine. They want ideas for shopping bags of recycled material, and you only need to send pictures and instructions there by the end of this month, not the actual bags. I already made one bag today, but I think I'll make an improvement to it before taking a photo. I have lots of ideas and recyclable/recycled material waiting. This will keep me busy for some time now, but I will not show my bags before the deadline. Who knows, there may be spies reading my blog and they could develop my ideas further and win the whole competition ;0).

Go green and abandon the plastic bags!

Today I have been rather busy. In the morning I finished the second of the bags using some linen/cotton printed by Hollabee.
This is the first one, the print is Icy Blue Floating. Since it was just a little piece, I used some navy blue heavy cotton to make a shopping bag. The lining is solid dark blue, and there is a zippered pocket inside. This one I made during the weekend, so I had the photo taken on Monday!


Below is the bag I finished this morning. (Photo from Monday.) The pattern is Rubine Red Swirl.
The bag is a little smaller than the first one, and I used the whole bit of printed fabric to make the top of the bag. Therefore the outside pocket is of the navy cotton. For the lining I used the same beige checked fabric as under the kotkarankki text on my blog head. Inside pocket with zipper here too.

The rest of the day included a train trip to Kerava to meet my son after his day at work. Before I met him I had some time to got to a fabric shop I know from the early days of my life here. Luckily the shop was celebrating their 28th anniversary. For fabric purchases over 28 euro they gave 28 % discount! This was an offer very hard to resist and so I didn't ;). I bought some flannel in two baby prints for my preemie quilts and other baby quilts I have planned to make for sale. This was absolutely necessary because I don't have any flannel left for the preemie quilts' backing, and I have plans to make a girly baby quilt to go with the blue pinwheel quilt I recently finished. Maybe I feel a little better about my shopping if I start cutting the pink quilt this week.

Pinwheel quilt and green thoughts

This is the pinwheel baby quilt with the checkered binding you voted for a while ago. I sat and waited for my father-in-law when he was having his feet seen to; and watched one episode of Heartbeat to finish the hand sewing part. The light blue shirts are not all the same colour, but when re-using material this can be accepted. (British series with village life and old times are my favourite.) Notice the little flowers, I have never before used embroidery in my quilts. The white squares looked so pale that I tried to cheer them up a little.




I haven't been lazy at all: on Saturday I finally made myself a light shopping bag to be carried with me at all times:

The pattern is a copy of our normal big plastic bags. Today I used it for the first time and carried 5 one litre jars, vegetables, apples, bread, cheese, meat and biscuits. It was very comfortable to carry. I used French seams because the material is synthetic, and I put a green bias binding at the top because a) I had a suitable length available and b) I'm going green with this bag.

It folds this small, and I will make a little pouch from the rest bit between the handles to keep the bag this small in my shoulder bag.