why I use cloth gift bags

I like to decorate for Christmas somewhere between the day after Thanksgiving and the first few days of December. My decorating isn't a huge to-do, but I do the must-haves. Something else I like to do is buy Christmas presents over the course of the year, and then finish my shopping on black Friday/cyber Monday with all the sales and whatnot. That usually translates into a huge pile of gifts that need to be wrapped.

A couple of years ago, to save myself time and money and also to exercise some budding creativity, I started making gift bags. I buy a couple of yards of Christmas fabric every year in mid-December when it goes on sale and add to my collection of bags. It paid off immediately, and it continues to pay off now both as a money savings and an efficiency thing.

The gift bags are very simple to make if you have a functioning sewing machine. I won't bother with a tutorial because there are about a billion already available. Mine are the extremely simple "cut a rectangle, fold it in half with the right sides together, sew along the two edges that share a corner with the folded edge, flip it inside out, and sew a ribbon about 1/3 down" variety, though I could easily get fancier with hemming and decorative edging and making the bottoms more box-shaped and drawstrings and blah blah blah. I don't have time for that nonsense.

And because I had this nifty stash of gift bags ready to go, I saved myself a lot of time and a LOT of trouble with gift-wrapping. I had a pile of presents to wrap, and I was able to get it done in about 10 minutes. Add another 10 minutes to account for time spent making new bags for the oddly shaped gifts, and I was done.

It was glorious.

File this under "do your single-mom-self a favor."