Reusable gift bag from upcyled shirts

Hello, and welcome! Christmas is almost here, and I've been busy wrapping gifts for friends and family. And because I always avoid buying any kind of wrapping supplies, I tend to get creative and make gift bags reusing or upcylcing other materials. 

So today I'm showing you the reusable gift bag I made using old shirts.

The shirts (3 in total) were too small for my son, and since there were hand me downs there was already some wear and tear here and there, so they were perfect for this projet. 

I started by cutting four rectangular panels and sewing them together:

Then I joined them to another bit of contrasting fabric (which is effectively the bottom of the bag): 

And with this, the exterior of the bag was finished, I just needed to sew down the sides: 

I usually don't line these bags (you can check my original tutorial here), but in this case there were too many seams and I prefered to hide them with lining. So I used the backs of two of the shirts to create the lining (the solid  blue was actualy the reverse of the darker blue shirt, which I tought worked better for the lining color-wise):

I placed the lining inside the bag, wrong sides together, folded the edges inward and then top stitched all around: 

I then cut two thinner strips of fabric, joined them together, folded them biast-tape like and top stitched to create the cord to close the bag (I usually use a ribbon, and it would have worked just fine, but I wanted to use up as much fabric as possible from the shirts): 

Initially I added the cord to the side of the bag, over the side seam:

And while that's a great way to do it, in this particular case I then found out that the gift I wanted to place in this bag was too large for the cord to close it effectively:

So I used my seam ripper, and quickly decided on an alternative: I cut the cord in half and stitched each piece to the tops of the bag instead:

And now the gift fits in and the bag closes perfectly: 

I've made gift bags and gift boxes from many other things, from cereal boxes to vintage wall paper, so feel free to browse around (or use the seach box in the side panel) to check them out. Save on wrapping paper and reduce the waste this holidays season!

Happy Wednesday, and happy holidays!

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