A Travel Necessity

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm planning on doing some traveling next week. And in the wintertime, Keith and I do a lot of back and forth between home and Maine for skiing. One of the biggest annoyances of travel, for me, is laundry. I always end up with random socks and underwear stuffed into corners of my suitcase.

Luckily, Keith has an abundance of super-large t-shirts, like this one.


And with a little bit of fiddling, I was able to turn it into this (apologies for my terrible photography!)


It slips easily over the doorknob, or on a towel hook, to hold dirty clothes. On the way over, I'll use it to hold my shoes so they don't mess my clothes up in the suitcase!

It's not beautiful, but it sure is useful. Want to see how I did it?

First, I cut the hem off the bottom of the t-shirt. Then, I cut off the sleeves. I angled the cut so that I'd have as much of the t-shirt body left as possible, like so:



Then, I cut off the top of the shirt just below the neckline:

I turned mine inside out, so the original t-shirt design is inside my bag. I put a little star on the new outside, because I wanted to. Then, I sewed up the bottom of the shirt, and the holes where the sleeves were. That left me with a bag that looked something like this:

(It's actually much more even than it looks in the picture!)

I cut off one of the sleeves and cut a strip out of it that was about 12x3". (That's the handle.) I folded it over and sewed up the long seam...

And then turned it inside out. To give it a more finished look on the inside (because I'm weird like that) I folded the ends in and sewed them as well, like so:
Now, back to the bag. I folded the top over, and the folded it again, so that the raw edge wouldn't show.I stitched over the fold, leaving quite a bit of space so there would be room for the drawstring. The first time, I didn't pin it, and then later wished I had.

And, voila! Time to attach the strap. I put mine in the back, and stitched over the existing seams (so there's room for the drawstring to go through!)

I cut a little hole between the two straps, and used a safety pin to lead the string around the top of the bag. For the drawstring, I just used the hem I had cut off the t-shirt.

Voila! Rufio approves :)