Craft: The easy peasy T Shirt shopper!

Eeeexciting! Today is my first ever craft post and I was trying to think about which thing to do first so it seemed a little obvious to use the one that I use the most. These bags are just the handiest thing. They are great for prezzies for people and a fab way of doing a bit of recycling and general do-goodery. Biggest bonus they are pretty much a piece of piddle to make!

You will need:

An old tee, something with a good design

Pair of pretty sharp Scissors

A Stapler

 Gaffa/Rhino Tape

a Tape Measure

A Pen

Little tip: if you have a dark t shirt, get black gaffa; a light one get the white. Just looks better....

The first thing that you need to do is to turn the t shirt inside out and cut off the sleeves.

Lay your T Shirt out as flat as you can and then starting at the bottom lay strips of Gaffa across the fabric. You want to smooth out any creases in the fabric as you go, it just makes life easier later on. Keep working up the fabric right the way to the top! Once you have gone right to the top, flip the t shirt and do the same on the back. Having a Cat assistant is optional.....

So when you are done taping you will have sort of sealed the t shirt shut. You now need to trim it up. Cut an inch off the bottom so that it in now open again and cut out the neck hole.  Down the sides cut away any excess tape but being ridiculously careful not to cut through the fabric.  

You now need to trim the sleeves. You want to make them a little exaggerated as these bits are going to form your handles. Once you have a shape your happy with, fold your t shirt in half so that you can create the mirror image down the other side of your t shirt and your handles will match and trim away! 


You then need to fold your t shirt so that the two side seems are on top of each other. So instead of the seems running down the sides they are in the middle.

Making sure your hems are matching, half and inch up from the bottom staple right across the bottom. You want the staples as straight and as close to each other as possible.

Run a strip of Gaffa over the staples so that you don't end up catching your fingers on them.

So you need to move back up to the top of the bag now to sort out the handles. In the neck hole, you need to make that shape more exaggerated so that you can get all of your crap in the bag! Im limited by the print on mine as I didn't want to cut through Darth's Lightsaber; I don't think he could handle that- so I had to cut my hole slightly smaller. You want to do it to around the pink line that I drew on the t shirt if you can; if you can't it just means you have a smaller hole but it's not a big problem! 


Right now comes the tricky bit. Stick with me and hopefully the pictures help to make things a little clearer... You need to make this shape out of the t shirt....

To do it, you pick up the bag by one of it's bottom corners and it should naturally bend in the middle. You then need to grab the opposite corner and nip them together. Then lay them down flat on the floor or table and it should make the shape above.

From that bottom point you want to measure 5 inches up the bag and draw a straight line across. No, I'm not really sure why my tape measure says 3 inches, Im such a dumbass sometimes but it is definitely 5 inches from that bottom point.

Now trim off that extra little point that you don't need and like you did on the bottom; staple right across the line and then cover it with a strip of gaffa again. Then flip the bag over and do the same with the other point. All you need to do then is just turn the bag inside out! I hope i've made the instructions as clear as I can. It's not the easiest thing to describe but it really is the easiest thing to make!

What do we think?? Im pretty pleased with this one really and i've been using it to store all my knitting in. You could make a whole fleet of them for re-usable shopping bags and you would look the dandiest kid in Morrisons! Hurrrah!