Vintage Cloth Christmas Gift Bags

I used to love wrapping presents. I worked at Restoration Hardware during college (terrible idea btw - I shopped more than I worked and ended each shift in the negative $$). I learned the fancy retail way of gift wrapping using sharp edges, double sided tape, and folds along the edges. I spent hours wrapping a handful of beautiful gifts for my boyfriend/fiance/husband back in my roaring 20's.

Now we've got two kids and what seems like thousands of thousands of gifts to wrap each Christmas. This situation led to me dreading Christmas gift wrapping time. I'd put it off, get all stressed about it, it was no good. 

I was so grateful when I got a few of the ugly blue Amazon cloth gift bags - I reused those over and over. It got me thinking. I could sew these bags in cute Christmas fabrics - spend 2-3 hours sewing them and then re-use them every year; saving myself hours of effort and stress every Christmas. 

I downloaded a Jo-Ann's Fabrics coupon and bought a yard of fabric in practically every Christmas fabric they had. It did take an initial investment of about $100 I think (but over the years I'll save $$ by hardly ever buying gift wrap again!). I did a mix of vintagey older looking fabrics and cartoon/disney fabrics for the kids.

Look how great these came out! I adore the vintage old-timey look and feel of these under the tree. Let's not forget all the landfill fodder and poor sad trees that are wasted in every house as wrapping paper is ripped, wasted, and trashed every Christmas.

Scroll below the pics for a link to the tutorial (it's so easy, it's basically sewing a pillow case with a ribbon added):

*Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, meaning that I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you.

Materials:
- Buy as much fabric as you'd like bags. I did about half a yard of fabric per a pattern which gave me 1-3 bags depending on how large or small I made them. I didn't really measure anything out because I wanted a million different size bags.
- about 30” of ribbon per bag (a little more or a little less depending on bag size obviously)
- Janome sewing machine
- Thread of different colors
- Fabric sewing scissors
- Sewing pin set (with tape measure and pin cushion- all the basics)

TUTORIAL:
I'm not going to try and tell you how I did the sewing. Mainly because when I tried writing out I found it incredibly boring to try and originally re-write a blog that I followed for help on this. Spool of Thread's tutorial is better than anything I could put together. Very detailed. The only thing I'd add is not to sweat perfection. I left raw edges on the inside to save myself a few minutes effort (gasp) and I don't regret it for a minute!