Earth Day Sewing

I saved two large sunflower seed bags from feeding the birds this past winter to turn into reusable bags with handles.  Here's a picture of one of the bags before I cut it up.  They are made of a tarp type of woven plastic material.

Next time I have one of these bags, I'll open it better so I can use more of the blue jay in the finished bags.  I had to trim his wing off just above his head because of the jagged way I opened both bags.  I was able to cut the bottoms off both bags and turn both of them into bags by boxing the corners and turning a 1.5" facing strip to the inside of the bag top to reinforce the top edge for attaching handles.  Unfortunately the chickadee ends up decapitated in order to make similar sized bags and also to avoid having the word "Noir" appear on the outside of the bag.  I cut the bags in half horizontally between the words "Tournesol" and "Noir".  I cut the front and back sections of both bag tops apart and used two fronts to make a third bag and both backs to make six handles and also sewn in facings for the third bag.   Each bag is 13" tall, 6" deep and 15" wide.  Here are the three bags I made.

I used a heavier duty needle in my machine, especially necessary when I was sewing through the handles which were triple thick and the top of the bags which were double thick.  Here's another picture of the three bags and the small piece I had leftover.

Happy Earth Day!