A bag for a gift

I always like the idea of giving a gift in a gift bag but at between 80 pence and £2.50 a go it's a lot more expensive than conventional wrapping paper. I've therefore been thinking about making my own gift bags.

This weekend I had the perfect opportunity. I had a suitable size brown paper bag that I'd been given in a shop for a small purchase and had come across some left-over wallpaper. The wallpaper not only had a striking design but is thicker than conventional wrapping paper and so I felt it would hold up to being made into a bag.

I began by dismantling the brown paper bag, carefully prising open all the glued seams.

Next, I folded the paper handles out of the way and used it as a template to cut out a rectangle from the wallpaper.

Placing the paper bag over the wallpaper rectangle I then folded along all the lines of the original bag.

Re-checking with the brown paper template as I went, I used double-sided sticky tape to construct a new bag from the wallpaper.

The inside base looked a bit messy so I cut out another rectangle of wallpaper and stuck this over the bottom.  This not only hid the seams but gave a further level of rigidity and strength to the bag.

The next step was to add some handles. A few years ago I picked up a rivet set for the princely sum of £1.00. The set included 100 rivets so I wasn't expecting too much from it, and admittedly didn't get perfect riveted holes but they seemed to do the job. Lining up where I wanted the handles I punched 4 riveted holes along the top edge of the bag.

Of course, if your chosen paper is very robust you could just use a hole punch to make the holes. You could also cut your paper template about 3cm taller and fold over this margin so that your holes are punched through a double thickness of paper.

All that was left to do was to add the handles which I raided my ribbon box for.  As you can see in the photo I've a lot of ribbon! Some is left over from other projects but I also salvage ribbon from pretty much everything - boxes of chocolates, gifts, even those that come attached to the inside shoulder seams of clothes to keep them on the hanger. You don't need to use ribbon if you don't have any since buying it specially would rather defeat the object of making your own gift bag at a lower cost than buying one. Depending on the look you are going for you could use wool, raffia, string - whatever you have to hand.

If you think this all sounds like a bit of a palaver, it was all done in the time it took me to drink a mug of coffee - which I did as I went. I was pleased enough with the result to use it immediately. A friend who has been loving all my crocheted animals is about to move into a flat in a newly converted church. I thought it only right that her church flat should have a church mouse.

Wrapped and ready to go