Laundry bag from recycled pillow case

Here's another simple project: a travel-sized laundry bag made from an old pillowcase and a long strip of fabric for the drawstring. 

Making this bag, I got the chance to use my newest sewing gadget: the bias tape maker.  The good news is that I picked it up for half price :-).  The bad news is that it was at Fabricland's closing sale :-(.

I used a toothpick to help feed the fabric through the bias tape maker.  Then I pressed the newly formed bias tape as it came out of the bias tape maker.

Once all the fabric went through the bias tape maker, I folded it in half along its length and pressed it again.  Then I stitched it along its length to make the drawstring.

And here's the finished drawstring:

Then I unpicked a part of the pillow case hem, just wide enough to fit the drawstring. I stuck a safety pin to the drawstring...

....so I could feed it into the casing (i.e. the hem of the pillowcase). Then, I stitched the ends of the drawstring together using the buttonhole stitch on my machine (a small and tight zigzag stitch probably would have achieved the same effect but I didn't think of it at the time).

Here's the final drawstring...

...and the final bag.