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Reuse - Make old shopping bags into a wallet

04.27.2008 Comments Related

On my quest to go green, I'm making a quick stop to pat myself on the back for mastering one of the R's, Recycle. Now I'm starting to focus on another R, Reuse. Today I mentioned something on twitter and @tony sent me a cool link on how to reuse old shopping bags.

Original Tutorial on EtsyLabs

Read the original tutorial for the full details. I'll explain what I did, and didn't do to make it work.

I set the iron to 1 notch below the highest temperature.
I used plain printer paper, the wax paper melted into the bags.
I didn't keep the iron on for a full 15 seconds, more like 5 seconds on each side.
When peeling the plastic from the paper, if you do it too soon the plastic is still melted and you'll rip holes in your project. If you wait too long the plastic will stick to the printer paper.
For my wallet project, I intentionally left the iron on longer so the paper would stick to the plastic and act as a backing. It gave the wallet more rigidity which worked nicely.
I used 8 layers. The wallet took 2 whole bags from Target.

Ok, I didn't really know what I was going to make when I started, I just sort of whipped out the sewing machine and started going. I'll make another one of these with a little more thought and planning like where the seams will go. I have little patience so the first time around I totally winged it. You can see I didn't finish the middle seam because I bent the sewing needle. Again, my patience came into play because I was too lazy to change it to a more sturdy denim needle.

Here are some pics, I didn't really take photos during the ironing cause I though the whole thing would be botched at that point.

I had a lot of fun with this. I plan on doing some more, I have some brown bags, pink bags and white bags that I've already fused so I'm all ready to go. I've also been saving plastic containers, even have a cool egg carton made from clear plastic that I'll hopefully make into something cool.

Now for that other R, what was it again? Oh yeah, Reduce!

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Comments Comment Feed

jamie 04.27.2008 #

try using freezer paper (not wax paper), it wont stick to the plastic. target bags have to my favorite for this because of the awesome pattern on the side. i made a pillow out of it (see at my recraft blog) and used shredded paper as the filler.

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