I’m with you. I made some of mine, but either way (my design or theirs) the handles are wide and comfortable, and I never feel like I’m going to cut through my hand, like I did with the plastic bags.
If they get dirty, I put them in the wash with other things, so they never need their “own” wash. They hang to dry.
And you do get a 5 cent discount at a lot of stores for each one, so that is nice, too. The few plastic bags I get usually go to the public library where people take them for their books.
I got three huge reusable bags at Ikea on vacation last year - they are blue & made of woven plastic-y stuff. Purina is now making cat food bags out of the same stuff - it is like heavy duty plastic, but woven. Yet somehow watertight. I’m going to use it to line some of the bags I have already for frozen foods and milk.
My parents grew up very poor during the Depression and being wasteful wasn’t an option. They passed that along to us. Now, I try to do as much as I can.
The plastic woven bags - are they made out of packing straps? Like the yellow and other colored straps that come around pallets of goods? I’ve seen those advertised and I thought they’d probably be some heavy duty bags. Those straps are impossible to break!
My grandparents lived through the Depression too. They literally lived off the land, from the garden Grammie tended to the baking she did, to the game Grampie shot. Storebought bread was a real treat, lol. I so admire the way my grandparents lived that although my life is nowhere near what theirs was, I’ve tried to emulate them in a lot of ways. If we all lived the way they did, we’d all be millionaires. No throwaway society then. We still have wool patchwork quilts made out of their winter coats after they got too worn to wear. Canning and home cooking, sewing everything, raising their food-theirs was a great generation, eh?