Making and Recycling

I still can't believe how many plastic shopping bags we end up with at the house, despite our efforts to use reusable totes.  I sometimes stitch on them and lately, I started experimenting with fusing them together.

So from this:

I made this:

Because I fuse 6 to 8 layers together, the plastic becomes sturdier and has a whole different texture to it which I like. Then, as I can never find the perfect sketchbook (which would ideally hold calendar pages and to do lists  that could be discarded as well as sketch pages and miscellaneous notes to keep), I made my own and it looks like this:

The screw posts make it easy to get rid of the old and only keep what I need.  Of course, my favorite part is the lemon bag net that's frayed on the cover:

 

Voila..