One Piece Reusable Tyvek Bag (sack)

Durable, water resistant and eco-friendly, take a Tyvek mailer and make a small sack to carry your lunch or goodies in!

11.5" x 15" size Tyvek mailer. Doesn't matter what carrier it comes from, we're going to make it so we're not stepping on anyone's toes!

This will be the only cut we'll make for this project! Using a pair of scissors or x-acto knife, cut that adhesive strip off at its fold. DO NOT throw this away! We're going to utilize this a bit later.

Now take the envelope and turn it inside out. You can use a butter knife to get those finicky corners to stay sharp but do so gently.

Fold the bottom of the envelope about 3". You can go thinner but 3" seems to make a decent bottom for the sack. Be sure to burnish that edge down well, we will be using these folds as guides for future steps!

Leave the first fold intact (IOW, don't unfold what you did in the previous step). Create two "dog ears" by folding each corner up. Burnish well to keep our guidelines crisp.

Now unfold the dog ears and the first 3" fold you made. Using the just created dog earred guides, fold the long edges of the envelope so it "touches" where the arrow below shows. These folds will create the sides of the bag.

Using the folded guides, gently push the bottom of the bag so it "flattens" out a bit, then crimping along the edge with your fingers, create a box bottom as shown below. It make take some doing but this is why we burnish the folds as crisp as we can. It makes this part of the process easier. Repeat this mantra: "its like doing origami....breath and fold".

Those two flaps on the bottom will force you to make a decision. You can leave them on the outside of the bag and tape them down *or* you can create an inverted fold so that the flaps are on the INSIDE of the bag. I typically fold them so they are inside the bag then taking that adhesive strip we cut off early on (remember I said not to throw it away?), I tape the flaps down. The nice thing about using the tape supplied with the mailer is that it optimally adheres to Tyvek.

That's pretty much it! You can decorate your bags with permanent markers or with acrylic paints (which I use on the Tyvek wallets I make. The great things about these bags is that they withstand a lot. In testing its durability, I shook 3 heavy cans of soup to make sure it was going to hold! To top things off, the bottom of the bag is never actually removed so there's a safety net there. Leaky leftovers aren't an issue either and these can be rinsed out!