Make a tote bag from a t-shirt

Before you begin 

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples can be found here. Don’t forget to make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely. 
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help if you’re short on helpers.  

Setting up this activity

• For this activity, you’ll need lots of old adult sized t-shirts. You could ask each person to bring one with them. They could be blank or they could have an appropriate design on them.
• When choosing the t-shirt, remember the thicker the fabric, the sturdier the bag.
• You could also have blank t-shirts and fabric pens, so people can design their own bag. 
• These bags are great for using on camp or residential events, such as a washbag, as a laundry bag, as a dirty shoes bag or as a plate bag - but not all at once!

Running this activity

1. Gather everyone together and tell everyone that you’re going to turn a t-shirt into a tote bag. You’ll be recycling, or upcycling the t-shirt, as you’re turning it into something else. You could ask if anyone has ever upcycled something before.
2. Lay shirt out on a flat surface. Try to smooth wrinkles out of the fabric.
3. To start, everyone should turn the old t-shirt inside out.
4. Next, cut off the sleeves. Cut the fabric just before the seam where the sleeves are sewn to the body of the shirt. The seam will make your handles stronger.
   • If you’d like to fold the t-shirt in half you can cut both sleeves at once so that they are identical.
   • If your material is too thick to cut both sleeves at once, you can cut one, then fold the t-shirt in half and use the cut side as a guide to cut the next sleeve.
5. Now, cut around the collar of the neck area of the t-shirt. Try to cut a slightly oval shape as opposed to a round one. Cutting a deeper neck into the shirt will make your bag have a bigger opening.
6. Next, make the bottom part of the bag. Measure and rule out a line in pencil about 5cm-7cm from the bottom of the t-shirt. This will be where the bag will end, so you can make the line 5cm, 6cm or 7cm from the bottom of the t-shirt, depending on how big you want the bag to be.
7. Add masking tape along this line to make it clearer.
8. Cut the left and right seams at the sides of the shirt from the bottom up to the tape line. You should now have a front and back part of the shirt that are separated from each other.
9. Next, you’re going to create a fringe. Use your scissors to cut slits in the t-shirt that go from the bottom of the t-shirt up to the tape line. Make them about 1cm to 1.5cm apart. Cut the slits in both the back and the front layers of the shirt together, making sure they line up.
10. Take one of front pieces of fringe and tie it to it’s matching back piece of fringe. The two pieces of fringe should pair up and sit one on top of each other if the shirt was cut correctly.
11. Repeat this process until all the strands are tied.
12. Once all the pieces of fringe are tied together, remove your tape and turn your bag inside out. 
13. You may want to tie knots at the tops of the handles.
14. Finally, if you want to, you can decorate the bags. You could use fabric glue to attach sequins, use fabric pens to decorate, or use a needle and thread to sew on buttons, embellishments or fabric cutouts.