DIY shopping bag storage

I think I must have been bored this weekend because I started looking for trouble. Or maybe it’s because I was sick of being woken up in the middle of the night by a cat rummaging shopping bags out of the bottom of the little tube they were stored in. I’m sure most people either have one or have seen one – a mesh or cloth bag where you stuff the plastic shopping bag in the top and then when you’re ready to reuse them, you pull them out of the bottom.

Whoever came up with that ingenious design obviously didn’t think that cats would be remotely interested in pulling them out or they might have done away with the hole in the bottom altogether. Mojo probably wouldn’t give a rats about them but Rosie thinks that plastic bags are the best toy. She will find them in the most unusual of places and the noise of them being ripped apart in the middle of the night irritates me enough to wake me fully up.

So I decided that I could make my own. After all, I made my own stuffing for a DIY camera bag (let’s not speak of its dismal fate after we returned from Tasmania) and it wasn’t overly challenging. It wasn’t overly neat either but it served the purpose at the time. And what with Rah whipping up all sorts of things with her sewing machine (with varying degrees of sucess),  I figured I could probably make my own dilly bag. I made one of these things in high school and I’m pretty sure it only took a double period of classes – so it should be a cinch right? Well it would have been – if I was still 12yo and remotely knew how to thread a sewing machine. Fortunately, my machine caters for complete dummies like me and prints the threading instructions on the machine itself instead of in the instruction manual which is probably lost by now.

It took me about 2hrs to make one simple little dilly bag. Sewing bloggers all over the world are probably laughing right now. Even Rah is probably laughing at me. But that’s ok, because in the end, I finished what I set out to do. Here it is, hanging nicely on my pantry door from its far too long draw cord.