Upcycling: ‘Ethno’ shopping totes

Today’s blog post features another upcycling project, namely some ethno shopping totes we made from a pareo. 🙂 The thin, lightweight polyester fabric was ideal for making shopping totes since they can be folded up and be carried around in every pocket, handbag or rucksack. In this way, you will always have a shopping bag to hand when being up and about without the need to use and buy a nasty, wasteful plastic bag. 🙂 Thus, it is an essential item for a ‘zero waste’-lifestyle.

We used a pareo, which we had discovered on a fleamarket, because of its beautiful print, but you can also use any other thin, but sturdy fabric for making a tote, e.g. most scarves can be used for this purpose. To make the bag even more useful, we added a small cotton interior pocket – for keeping coins, keys, a pencil, etc. 🙂

Instructions for making a simple tote:

1. Cut off two strips of fabric along the length of your fabric (scarf, etc.) which ought to be about 5 cm/2 inch wide. These will be your straps. For long straps (like we used for our totes) that will fit comfortably around your shoulders, strips of about 85 cm/33.5 inch will be good.
2. Sew these strips together.
3. For the body of your tote you will need a long rectangle. Cut your fabric to the desired shape, then fold in the middle and sew both sides together.
4. Now sew both straps to the top edge of your tote. Fold the top edge inside and make a wide seam. Your tote is ready now.
5. If you can sew well, you can make a little pocket out of some spare fabric and incorporate it into the top seam.

 

Zero Waste: How to shop groceries plastic-free

Today’s blog post continues our series about a Zero Waste and plastic-free lifestyle, and we will show you how you can shop groceries without using plastic bags or other single-use packaging 🙂 .

The first thing you need will be a variety of cloth bags, e.g. simple bags made of unbleached canvas, in various sizes. You will need some large ones for buying things like potatoes, tomatoes or lettuce or such like (these don’t necessarily need a string to close them, a simple open rectangular bag will do), and some smaller ones with a string for loose bulk food like rice, lentils or beans, etc. You can either buy these ready-made, but you can also easily make them yourself if you are the crafty type 🙂 . For example, if you have old silk or cotton scarves (=very thin fabric) you no longer want or need, you can use those for making bags for bulk supplies. Because of the thin, light flimsy fabric of many scarves, they are ideal for shopping.

Instructions for upcycling a scarf into a grocery bulk bag: Cut up your scarf in the middle so that you have two lengths of rectangular fabric. Fold each rectangle in the middle. Sew the edges together on either side, either with a sewing machine or by hand. If you want to use your bag for small bulk supplies like beans, make a seam at the top end of your bag and pull a string through it. Finally, weigh your bag and write its tare weight (=weight of packaging) directly on the bag so that the shop assistants at the customer desk won’t have to weigh it every time before you go into the store and fill it in the bulk section.

If you want to buy ‘wet’ bulk supplies like e.g. pickles, olives, ‘wet’ cheese like feta, etc., you have several options, depending on whether you have a car or not. If you have a car, you can simply use empty glass jars which you bring along when you go shopping. If you don’t want to have them weighed at the customer desk every time before you fill them, write their weight (=’tare’) on the jar with a permanent marker. However, if you don’t own a car (like us!) and cannot lug around a variety of heavy glass jars when going grocery shopping, you can use lighter metal containers for ‘wet’ bulk supplies: very useful are light steel or aluminum soupcans that are normally used as portable lunch containers, but use can also use cookie tins or even metal tea boxes. 🙂

Happy plastic-free grocery shopping!! 😀

Do you use other containers or bags for buying plastic-free bulk groceries? Let us know in the comments! 🙂