Ecobag

Nowadays it seems de rigeur to refuse a plastic bag in favour of one you've brought along yourself. Before Christmas I bought this Japanese pattern book for eco-bags from e-bay:

The link to the page on e-bay is here and shows more pictures from inside the book. There are lots of great quick-to-make bags to save on using up plastic ones. It's taken me until now, but here's the first one I've made. I used some old poly-cotton that has been hanging around for years waiting for its time to come. Well, poly-cotton, your time is now - 100% cotton would probably be too thick to use in this bag, in the book it looked like they used rip-stop nylon for strength, but the thought of sewing slippery nylon gives me the shudders - poly cotton is bad enough.

You fold up the bag into the little pouch that you can see attached to the top - about 3 X 4 inches - just right to pop in your handbag.

And here it is, modelling a loaf of bread to show its capacious properties. Actually, if I made another one I would probably make it a bit longer, this was the largest of 3 size options and even so, I think it's a tad short. The other problem I had was converting all of the measurements from centimetres to inches, because my rulers only have inches on them. Even though we 'did' metric measurements at school, I'm still an unreconstructed ounces, pounds, inches, yards kind of a woman. Still, that's my problem, the instructions in the book were really clear and I just followed the pictures. I'll definitely make more bags from the same book.