Origami Market Bag

My friend Debbie showed me how to make this ingenious bag, but you can also find online tutorials, such as this one. Debbie and I have been making plain bags that our craft group members will decorate. Yesterday I decided to use my scraps of shweshwe material to make one to put a gift in, rather than use paper gift wrap.

I joined pieces of shweshwe to make a rectangle, with length three times the width, and sewed it to a lining, which hid all the seams:

Then comes the fun bit, the folding:

Triangles at the end, one up and one down, and then one more fold to turn it into a bag:

The points at the top are overlapped and covered with a fabric tube to form a handle, and voila, a very simple shopping bag. You can box the corners, but I decided not to.