Making embroidered stars out of recycled shopping bags

Dear community,
in this blog post you can find easy instructions for making embroidered stars out of recycled shopping bags.

Make a smart Christmas ornament?

Think of embroidered stars out of recycled shopping bags!

Some time ago, I realised we have so many ‘reusable bags’, all with publicity prints on. We really collected a lot of them, too many to be useful. Why not recycle them?

In the Christmas season, it is a nice and easy decoration project to embroider Christmas-colour stars and cut them out.

What do you need to embroider stars of recycled bags?

• One or more bags made of a middle weight cloth
• Contrasting Mettler sewingthread (Seralon) Choose for red or green, depending on the background.
• Mettler metallic gold, green or red
• BERNINA embroidery machine (I use the BERNINA 700) and the Large Oval hoop
• The embroidery file: BERNINA Christmas star 2019

You don’t like to use metallic thread?

A few tips will help you:

• Lower the machine tension
• Choose for a metallic needle (it has a bigger eye).
• Put the bobbin farther away from the machine (to prevent the thread of curling).
• Reduce machine speed
• –> This will help you a lot!

Let’s start:

Cut the bag open.

Fix the cloth in the hoop.

Embroider the stars in red or green, depending on the background. Finish with the metallic thread.

Remove the project from the hoop.

Cut the stars out, leaving about 2mm around each star.

You are ready.

See how nice they look as gift decoration:

Use them to decorate the tree.

Why not spread them around on the furniture?

Easy and quick, as I told you 🙂 .