Bulk bags... a story




Today I finally made what I was planning to do for weeks... my homemade bulk bags.
My mom is a longtime seamstress, along many other skills she has (knitting, gardening, baking, bread making). It's been on my mind since I'm leaving the family house fairly soon, that maybe I should learn more life skills from my parents. I'm yet to learn how to chop down a tree but sewing was one skill close to my heart. 
My mom made my sister and I dresses and skirts when we were little, and all sorts of cloth for our dolls. Maybe I could some day sew a whole christmas outfit for my dog, who knows?

Diving into the zerowaste awarness, I really wanted to first reduced my food packaging. I am lucky to live near a "farmers" market -most of them are sadly resellers when it comes to fruits and veg-. Supermarket also provide unpackaged fruits and veg but most of them still offer plastic bags to store them -although there are more and more biodegradable plastic bags or paper bags provided these days *yay*-. 
Using cloth bags to buy fruits and vegs will not be as hard for me as in some plasticlovers supermarket. 
I also have access to various bulk ingredients (oat, nuts, rice, pasta, raisin, ...) in my organic shop, bulk bags have a promising future around here.

Since having the opportunity to use said cloth bag, and since my mom has a cloth collection bigger than my jumper one... I decided to start learning sewing. 
I made two types of bulk bags, the blue ones are made in strong but light material: organdy. 
It's really easy to cut, sew and handle. The bags (29 x 20 cm) weight only 7,5 g.

Then my mom wanted really thin but long ones, so I tried another material, a very thin coton. It was a lot harder to mesure, cut and sew, but in the hand they do not look as bad as feared. This little bags only weight 6g.
We had to reajust the under sewing bobbin because it was to tight, we also tried different stitching frequency/ concentration (no idea how to explain properly this in french, neither in english sorry). The thin hem at the top was also challenging but with patience and care I made it. 

The last bag, is an impermeable bag to store my reusable cloth pads when I'm out and about. I've been testing Thinw underwear and Plim clothing pads lately. And when in town, pads are the easiest solution for me. I'd seen many cute permeable bags on the internet, but having just booked my summer holidays... buying a 10€ little pouch was not in my plans. I found an old oilcloth in the basement, cut it, made two stitches, add a little press stud (thanks mom and your never-ending buttons, ribbons and wool collection) and Voilà! 
I still have to test it but I'm very pleased with it so far!

Started at 10 on a sunday morning, finished at 8pm but oh well, I'm so glad I did.
What have you done this sunday? Hope you had a good one.



 


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