How I made reusable sandwich bags

I decided it was time the family did away with the plastic sandwich bags .... for plastic sandwich bags.

That sounds a bit crazy doesn't it, but I promise you there is a method in my madness.

We have stopped purchasing plastic 'food bags' from the supermarket.  The ones that you buy in packs of 10/20 that fit your lunch in nicely and are reusable.  I'm ashamed to say, we don't reuse them that much or that often.

Something had to change!

I changed.

I decided for my next sewing project, I was going to make my own sandwich bags that the family can take to work with them, and because these are pretty PVC (I know!) bags, they come home again, cleaned out and reused.

My aim is to source the fabrics from scrap shops (I need one of these nearer to me!), car boots and charity shops, that way I'm keeping the PVC out of the landfill and stopping new plastics being purchased to go into landfill a week later too!

As this was my first time, I bought new fabrics.  I bought hearts in time for Valentine's Day, but, that didn't quite go according to plan and I had my first major setback with my sewing machine!

I broke it!

Well, I'm blaming the webbing, velcro and tension that broke my sewing machine!  I couldn't get the bobbin to take the thread at all, and then I lost one of the screws somewhere inside the machine (it's still to this day in there).  Then I copped an arse with the machine and refused to acknowledge that I even owned one!

I finally called my local sewing shop for help, and they were amazing.  They took my machine, serviced and fixed it and had it back to me in a week.

Valentine's Day had well passed by now, and I still refused to look at my limp pieces of PVC covered in rainbow straps and nothing else.

Finally, I got over myself and carried on and I'm so glad I did.  I learnt a lot, and feel the end result really did make it all worthwhile.

I don't have clear plastic sandwich bags in the house anymore, I use these homemade bags, which I hope to make more of at some time to do my part in reducing plastic, I won't be buying new ones again, I will source the PVC as mentioned above.

So what do you think?  do they look like they were worth the stress of ignoring I owned a sewing machine for a week?  I think so.