Trolling around the Internet last night, I happened upon a tutorial for a car litter bag. We normally keep a Wal-Mart bag on the floor of the back seat for that purpose, but that looks messy and is always in the way if we have more than one person in the back seat. The litter bag tutorial I found used brightly-patterned cotton fabric and had a pocket sewn on the front for tissues, or anything else you wanted to carry. I looked at my stash and saw an old pair of my wife's jeans, which I had already hacked up for another project, but they still had one leg, including the rear pocket intact. I figured using an already-made pocket would surely be easier than constructing a new pocket, so I decided to design my litter bag around that pocket. Here's what I did:
STEP 1: I pieced together enough jeans material to make a 12"x24" rectangle. Folded in half, that will make an 11"x11" bag. That may be smaller or larger than you want, but it seemed like a good size for us.
STEP 2: I salvaged about two feet of waistband from the front of the jeans, saving the button and the buttonhole. I just hacked them off, you may want to unsew the lower half, remove the excess fabric, and sew the waistband back together, this was a prototype, so I didn't take the time.
STEP 3: I folded the rectangle in half and sewed up the sides from the inside.
STEP 4: I hemmed around the opening.
STEP 5: I attached the two pieces of waistband to the backside of the bag to be used as hanging straps.
FINAL: The denim litter bag roughly matches the dark blue exterior of our car and keeps the trash off the floor. The pocket could be used to hold a small pack of tissues, a pen and note paper, MP3 player, Gameboy, or ???Because this was a prototype and I wanted to finish in a hurry, I didn't measure carefully or do any pressing. I'm sure you could produce a much better looking product.
To keep this on topic, I used my new Singer 603E for this entire project and it had no problems sewing through multiple layers of denim with a universal needle. I picked this beauty up in a local thrift shop last week. It came in a cabinet with drawers full of manual, attachments, cams, notions, and about a half-ton of buttons. The price - $30! Manufactured in 1963/1964, I consider the 600, 603 and 603E to be the last of the "good" Singers, after that, Singer began putting plastic gears in the innards and quality went quickly downhill.
Ed
