The Crafting Diaries: T-Shirt Bag

Author: Anna Ravanelle

With spring break just around the corner (and only one more week of prelims to go before we get there), this week I scoured Pinterest for projects that would make great crafts for going to the beach over break.

I found this great, easy tutorial from Heather at Mommypotamus to make a tote bag out of an old t-shirt.

Supplies:

• T-Shirt
• Scissors

(No, I’m not kidding. That’s all you need.)

 

The first thing you will do is cut the sleeves off the t-shirt. How far down below the sleeves’ openings is up to you, but keep in mind that they will be forming the straps of the bag  and determine how big the side openings are.

The t-shirt material will likely stretch once there are things inside the bag, so don’t cut the straps too long or they might stretch too much. To keep the two holes even, you can fold the shirt in half and use the first cut as a guide. Remember, it’s absolutely fine if they’re not perfectly even.

 

 

Next, you’re going to want to cut out around the neckline of the shirt to make an opening for the bag and finish making the straps. You could use a bowl or some other round object to trace a perfect half-circle, but I chose to freehand it. I went down about ⅔ of the length of the other strap cuts.

 

 

 

This last step is the most labor intensive – but that isn’t saying much. Cut off the bottom hem seam of the t-shirt, and then cut a fringe into both layers of the shirt.  Do this by cutting roughly 1-inch sections that go up three inches into the shirt. Once all these are cut, tie the front and back layers together in tight knots and pull the fringe so that it rolls into skinny strands.

 

 

There it is, your completed bag! If you don’t like the way the fringe looks on the outside, you can trim some of it off and turn the bag inside out so that it’s on the inside instead. Keep in mind that if you want to do this, you should turn the shirt inside out before you start tying the fringe strands together or the shirt’s design will end up on the inside.

 

 

While it took a little more time than the ten minutes allotted by the original tutorial, this bag was easy to make and surprisingly sturdy. It even held my 2,000+ page Shakespeare anthology with no problem. And the best part? If you run out of clean shirts on break, you’ve got an extra right at your fingertips! (Or, you know, you could just buy one…like a normal person).

 

 

Each week on “The Crafting Diaries” Anna Ravenelle scours Pinterest looking for exciting projects that claim the average crafter (and/or college student) should be able to accomplish and then sets out to prove them wrong. Usually failing in her crafting efforts, Anna works to flesh out the instructions of complicated projects so that you (yes, you!) can avoid failure where she did not.