Craftster Challenge #20 - My entry

I made the whole thing from recycled and thrifted materials (because of course, thrift stores keep treasures out of landfills). The printed and plain white fabric I found just as weird shaped ends hanging with all the sheets in one thrift store, and on another occasion, found a bag of webbing, and a bag of crazy 70's pom-pom trim. The only thing that isn't reused is the iron-on on the front, and the thread.

I had quite a few sources of inspiration, and I figure I'll explain the whole thing

Well, I knew I had to enter this challenge, as we already shop at a grocery store where you have to bring your own bags, or pay 5 cents each for the plastic ones. So we bring our own bags of course, and we definitely need some more!

Immediately I knew I wanted to have something related to wind power on the front. My BF works in the wind power industry, so it is an issue that is personal to me. His work has sent him on several trips to visit wind farms and he always takes great pictures, so I decided to use one of his pictures for my tote bag. And after going through his bumper stickers and badges with windpower slogans, I thought they were all pretty cheesy. So I decided to use the lyric I did, kind of change its intended meaning a bit. I'm sure Bob Dylan would approve .

So I took the photo, my slogan, and went off to work in photoshop. I'm no expert at it or anything, but I had a lot of fun tweaking the colours, making it look like the turbine and trees were glowing and stuff. I'm pretty happy with how the image turned out.






For the shape of the bag, I sort of based it on the PC 'Canada's Greenest Shopping Bag' which you can get for 99 cents at any grocery store that sells President's Choice brand stuff.

And I also wanted to include pockets like the ones on a tote bag that my friend brought back from Japan for me. They are awesome pockets, so I copied them!

This is me holding the pockets up out of the bag so you can see:




Theres lots of tucks and stuff, and I am *super* proud of how they turned out. In the process of pocket-making, you can see the pleats:




And the finished pockets:




The pockets in use:



Here's a few more shots from different angles - the back:




The inside, empty:




And the inside, full. Well, not totally full, it can still hold way more:




All the seams are reinforced three times so it doesn't break, and so it holds its structure better, like the PC bag. And the pom-pom trim is sewn in between the layers at the top, then tacked down on the outside so it doesn't get in the way of putting groceries and stuff inside.

The bag made its debut this weekend, it came camping with me. It held my biggest warmest sweaters, and I am impressed at the amount I was able to cram into it.
Hope fully the last image above is clickable to a very large downloadable image you can use for your own tote bag. Make sure to flip the image before printing.