Super Crafty

It's v. v. hot outside, but you don't need me to tell you that. What I AM going to tell you about is this very personal, deeply troubling problem I have.

I am continually forgetting to bring my re-usable grocery bags to the store. So I end up with this:

Trader Joe's makes a nice bag. It's sturdy. It can hold lots of things. But I only need so many. It's out of control. And did I mention hot outside? So I thought, let's do a craft with these extra bags! I could have searched the Internet, as I am certain other people have this problem and have made cool things with their bags, and summarily blogged about it, but I wanted to be original.

Previously, my paper bag successes consisted of turning the bags inside out and using them as wrapping paper at Christmas and putting them through a paper shredder to create free, eco-friendly Easter grass for our Easter Baskets. The problem with these endeavors is that Christmas comes but once a year, and the Easter grass never really panned out. I was never able to convince Brad of the moral neutrality of bringing my bags to his place of employment and using their paper shredder. He was worried the thick paper would brake the shredder. I'll admit that I considered purchasing a shredder to shred the bags myself, but I realized by the time I did that I might as well have bought some plastic Easter grass from the dollar bin at Target and planted a tree for less money. So, we still had that annoying plastic grass that is impossible to clean up, and a plethora of paper bags.

But yesterday, I came up with this:

Then we thought, maybe an off-the-shoulder dress:

Damn. I was going for thoughtful.

Flash of brilliance! Let's color them!

Except that our marker stash is pathetic.

"color wonder" markers do not work on paper bags

The most satisfying part was ripping the clothing off in one fell swoop:

We were left with this:

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand that's about as far as we got when we ran out of duct tape. You know those blogs where the author is super creative and takes fantastic, photo-journalistic pictures and everything looks devastatingly like a page from a Martha Stewart magazine? Yeah......this is not that blog.