Girl Scout Cookie & Onion Shopping Totes with Novelty Fabric

My daughter's Girl Scout troop has been together since kindergarten - our girls are now in high school - and the reason is our three leaders. They are kind, generous, loving, empathetic, and set low goals for cookie sales.

Despite how I feel about cookie sales - ok, I'll tell you how I really feel: The national Girl Scout organization has no business whatsoever being in the junk food business and should find another income stream.

But, like the GS organization's stance on good nutrition, hypocrisy-r-me. When I happened across several bolts of Girl Scout-themed fabric, including GS cookie-themed fabric - well, I seized those bolts like large, flat, rectangular footballs, tucked them firmly under my arm, and ran them to the cutting table, knocking intervening customers out of my way. Unlike the cookies themselves, (I told myself), the fabrics depicting them are calorie-free and fiber-licious!

So I made our leaders totes that stuff into their own pocket and can be easily carried in a purse.

Here's the front of one:

The back,:

Here are two of them bundled:

The front of the open tote turns into the back of the bundle:

 

I also made a label/ instruction sheet:

Extra tote bag - keep it in your purse.
To unbundle the tote, unbutton the white button and pull out the contents of the pocket.
To rebundle - Open the pocket as wide as it will go, start to turn it inside-out, stuffing the tote and then the strap into the pocket as you turn it, like a pair of socks. When the tote bag is stuffed all the way in, button the white button to the buttonhole along the top edge of the fabric.  Machine washable. Made with love! 

Feel free to borrow and adapt the language. Now of course, I wouldn't give a cookie-themed bag like that to my trainer! Oh no! I am way too much of a hypocrite! For Wendy, my dear fitness guru, I made a virtuous version:

Yes, here's the perfect way to use up your excess onion-themed fabric. Not to mention chicken soup-recipe fabric and jalapeno pepper fabric (for the strap.) Bundled and buttoned:

 Want to make some shopping totes like these? They're quick and easy. My step-by-step directions are toward the bottom of this post.

P.S. I'm sorry for what I said about Girl Scout cookies. I just read that they literally save lives, like the two women who were stranded and lived on them for two weeks, article here. The moral of this story is if you buy them, keep them in your car and don't eat them until your life depends on it.