Freezer Paper Bags

I made these fun tote bags for everyone for Christmas time and just loved them. I shared this on my family blog in January, but since everyone needs a great tote bag to take to the beach/pool/zoo/variety of summertime activities, I thought I would share it here as well! I saw a great tutorial on V & Co a few months ago on making wheat pillows with freezer paper and spray paint, and I was hooked. Unfortunately I didn’t really have a place for this design of pillows in the house, so I decided to see if it would work on these tote bags, and it was perfect!!

I printed this wheat stencil from Vanessa’s site, traced it onto some freezer paper and cut out the leaves.

I arranged the leaves on the bag and ironed them down. Luckily, they peeled off easily and could be re-ironed on if I changed my mind about spacing or layout.

I taped off an inch at the top of the bag because I wanted to keep a beige rim, and then spray painted it with two light coats of paint.

When it was dry, I just peeled off the freezer paper and was done!

It turned out so great! The freezer paper bonded really well to the bags so the paint didn’t bleed at all, and the stencil lines looked really sharp.

Once I saw how well this turned out I had to make more! For this brown bag I followed the same steps as for the blue one, and just spray painted the whole bag, including the handles. It turned out great, but took forever to do the entire thing and used most of a can of spray paint. But I still really like it.

I thought that a quicker way to make a bag like the one above would be to just start with a brown bag and spray paint the stencil area white, but this didn’t work. The paint just soaked into the bag and didn’t show up at all. So I used a few leftover scraps of linen from my cheater pillow, taped off little squares, cut out leaf and tree stencils with the freezer paper and spray painted those.

I then went against my no-sew policy and hand stitched them onto the bag. I was reminded why I don’t like to hand sew-it took forever!! But the end result was perfect and I was really happy with it. The spray paint did bleed a little on the linen, but it wasn’t that noticeable and still looked good.

Everyone loved their bags and I got finally got to make one for myself. I used a perfect summer blue, and went for a big flower design instead. It turned out just how I had wanted (a rare thing around here), and I can't wait to take it to the beach!!

Once I made this one I had so many ideas for fun summer bags: cute stripes, circles, letters or any other fun shape that you are willing to cut out of freezer paper! I'm lucky that I only had one blank bag left or I would have made a half a dozen more summer versions.

I'm linking to these fun parties this week, including the CSI Project, so click on the link here and see what everyone else has been working on. See you next Monday!!