Cheesecloth Produce Bag Tutorial

Jennifer — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:34:44 +0000

This is a quick and easy tutorial for cheesecloth produce bags. If you can sew a straight line, you can make these. Sometimes the pictures might make it more confusing than just reading the words, as you can’t tell which is the front and back of the cheesecloth, but bear with me, it will work out in the end. It looks a little untidy with the brown thread, but I needed to make it so you can see the stitches, it looks a lot neater when using natural coloured thread. I bought a package of cheesecloth and just cut it in two to make two produce bags. Each piece was approx. 17″ x 35″. You can easily make different sized produce bags if you want different sizes, the same method applies. Edited to add: There are varying qualities of cheesecloth. Make sure that you use a tighter weave cheesecloth so that you don’t have problems with snagging. This needs to be fairly sturdy to lug produce around. Materials needed: cheesecloth natural coloured thread natural coloured cotton yarn Cut a piece of cheesecloth 17″ x 35″. Fold over one of the long sides of cheesecloth by 1/4″. Iron it and fold it over again another 1/4″. Iron one more time. Stitch along the folded side. Now, fold the cheesecloth so that the short ends are at the top, wrong sides together. You want the outside of the side hem facing out. The side that you stitched is going to be on the right hand side when you are looking at it. You want to leave the top two inches of the folded side unstitched (this is where we will make the drawstring casing). Starting two inches down from the top, stitching slightly more than 1/4″ from the edge, stitch to the bottom. In the tutorial I used a zig zag stitch, but later found out that it is better to just use a straight stitch. Now stitch the left hand side from the very top, to the very bottom. Next, turn the bag inside out and press. Stitch down both sides 1/2″ from the edge , making sure to leave the top two inches (on the one side) unstitched. Turn bag right side out again and press. Next, fold the top of the bag in 1/4″ and press. Stitch all the way around. Fold the top down again and press. When you fold it down, you want the top to meet where the seam ends on the side. Stitch around once again to make the casing. Measure a piece of cotton yarn twice the width of the bag, plus a couple of inches. Tie a loose knot and stick a safety pin through it. Thread the pin through the casing until each end of the string is sticking out of the casing. Tie the ends of string in a knot and pull the string around so that the knot is now back inside the casing. There you go, one fantastic new cheesecloth produce bag. Enjoy!

The Girl by the Sea » reusable produce bag

Cheesecloth Produce Bag Tutorial