New Bag Love

In our house we've reached a point where we have almost too many reusable shopping bags. In this day and age when one acquires a new cloth shopping bag with every conference and gift with purchase promo it feels like reusable bags are in danger of becoming their own environmental menace. That said, of all the reusable bags we had, I didn't have any of the nice fold-up-really-small fit in your purse kind of variety. For ages now I've been meaning to make one, but when I saw the Flip and Tumble bags on Crunchy Chicken's website I folded and ordered two (one in pretty blue for me one manly black for Martin).

They arrived a few weeks ago and I'm totally smitten. I'll admit I'm totally suckered by the whole K-Way pocket approach (see a Quicktime video of the pocket in action here!) and my design snob self loves the monochromatic palette of the bag/handle combo. And, because it is as promised nice and small I've been keeping it in my bag since it arrived and using it all the time. I kept it in my purse in New York and it got plenty of use there, allowing me to not really need a bag for any purchases (until I went to Park Slope and blew my entire summer clothing budget in one afternoon, as those purchases would not fit in my lovely Flip and Tumble bag). Martin's also a fan of his svelt black/grey combo bag and has been putting it to regular use.

While I'm on the topic of Martin and reusable bags I do have to give one quick shout out to local reusable bag makers BYOB. Martin is a huge fan of their organic cotton deer bag, which he has termed "the stag bag". We use ours all the time for grocery trips, though it doesn't squash up small enough for me to carry it around all the time.