I make this! ..... Joe's wacky bag :)
 

I made this .... with a lot of tutoring from my wife. :D

For almost a year now I've been cutting 3.5" squares from any and all scraps my wife leaves after making her craft things. Cotton, canvas, and something kind of synthetic. I use them to test sew the machines I work on. I ended up with about 20 6.5" squares made by sewing the 3.5" squares together. What to do with them? I decided to make a wacky bag.
Sew, I used our newly acquired ALDENS machine and assembled the squares into a bag. Then Elaine showed me how to make an inner bag and make tucks on the side so the bottom would be flat. We used muslin for that.
After that the inner bag was put in the outer bag she showed me how to do the handles. Those were left over from another craft project so they didn't go to waste.

I think it turned out pretty good. The ALDENS worked good, even to sewing over multiple layers of material without stalling.

So below is the front and back of J Miller's wacky bag.

Joe

Wonderful! I love scrappy quilts and bags and you did a great job on this one. Much better than my first attempt, for sure!

Around here, they're about to ban plastic shopping bags and start charging for paper bags, so I've been setting aside some of my scraps to make a bunch of scrappy shopping bags too. They make great gifts, and great reusable gift bags too!

The machine is beautiful too. Love it.

Joe, That's a very nice bag, and an excellent idea for a shopping bag, like groceries.:)

Good job!! I personally love it! Gonna have to give it a try.

Very nice! what a good way to re-use/repurpose all those scraps!

Elaine has been making reuseable shopping bags from denim for quite some time. She takes them with her to WalMart and other stores. The looks she gets is quite amusing when the cashiers try to find the bar code to scan and then find out my wife made them to use.

She took some to sell when she went to the last craft festival and they didn't sell too well. To many lookie loos not enough spenders. Perhaps if enough places ban the plastic bags that will change. We can hope.

Joe

Great job on the bag! Neat to see projects done up from scraps! :)

I love seeing people using cloth bags.--I hate plastic shopping bags They say their bio-degradable but there has been one stuck up high in a tree in my back yard for the 6 months I've been here and it does not look like its bio-degrading to me.I use cloth bags for all my shopping.I even have a few I've put cardboard in the bottoms for my eggs and bread. When I shop at Aldi's I use the can good flats to carry out cans.I re-use the cardboard.

Hey Joe love the bag but I especially like the sewing machine. Its funny you shared this today as yesterday my cousin came in with two machines for me to look at. An old dusty singer that she got for $3.00 dh gonna clean and see if it works like likes its all together just needs new cords. The other macine is a very clean blacl shiny beautiful Aldean in a case. She got that for $15.00 and the man told her that it had tension problems. She took it home and attempted to sew on it(%$#GGKKH) you don't know what I want to say there as she knows absolutely nothing about machines. She said that it would pull the fabric thread realllllllllyyyyyy tight and she set the tension at 0. Hopefully my dh will be able to figure it out. I think I would really like to purchase it from her but i AM SURE she won't be asking no $15.00 for it and she wants her granddaughter to have it to play with ($%mgkog%&&gbhn&%).

Your talents continue to impress, amaze, and mostly enlighten me about old machines. Keep up the good work...great bag, that's my second favorite past time when not working on a quilting project. Really enjoy your posts..just recently moved from Western Ill. ...didn't know a thing about quilting or vintage machines till retirement a few years ago and found this board.