Gift Bag Mania — Making Fabric Gift Bags for Christmas
For the last month I’ve been sick with a nasty cold, followed by an equally nasty sinus infection and hacking cough. The only thing I felt well enough to do was make fabric gift bags. (Did I mention that I’m a bit obsessed with making gift bags?)
There are several things about these bags that make them fun to make (and give):
- For one thing, you can use up all those cute fat quarters you bought on impulse without knowing exactly how you would use them.
- Also, the bag pattern I use is lined on the inside with a coordinating fabric, so you can experiment with wild and funky fabric combinations that might drive you crazy if you had to look at them on a quilt day after day. Another bonus: fabric gift bags look great even if you use the very cheapest sale fabric from a big-box fabric store. I like to buy Christmas fabric on sale at Joann’s. I also use fabric that I pick up at the thrift store. (Save the really high quality fabric for a quilt that will get more wear and hopefully last longer than a gift bag.)
- And of course, the bags are reusable, so you feel virtuous whenever you use one to wrap a gift instead of paper that goes into the landfill.
Anyway, I made a lot of bags in the last few weeks.
Small ones…
Medium-sized ones…
And large ones…
I made lots and lots of gift bags — more than fifty in all. I’m going to give most of them as Christmas presents to my crafty friends, and save the rest for my family to use. Stay tuned for my next post, where I’ll give step by step instructions for making the three sizes of bags pictured above.
