We have a few laundry bags in our road trip camping kit for storing our dirty laundry. We don’t like keeping our dirty and clean clothes together on road trips, just simply because we want our clean clothes fresh and also seek to ease the efforts of doing laundry on the road. The great thing about DIY laundry sacks is they can be stuffed into wherever you have room in the vehicle and it helps to keep order in the vehicle from the many clothes you will go through on a big road trip.
We like to use no-see-um, or fabric mesh, for the base fabric of our laundry bags. This ensures that the material can breathe very well and the laundry bag doesn’t become a safe haven for odors. The material has held up well to repeated abuse, so we’d recommend it. Cotton is also a common material for a laundry bag, but these can be made literally with almost any type of material you have available. You could certainly use a pillow case or two, but having a nice paracord closure to the bag is a welcome addition to the design that prevents your laundry from spilling out everywhere. You could also modify a pillow case into a DIY laundry bag just by sewing in a closure.
You could potentially get dual use out of a DIY laundry bag for the camping road trip. If you made the laundry bag out of a fleece like material, they could double up as a pillow to put under your head at night. You might want to think twice about sleeping on your dirty laundry though, it might be more trouble than it’s worth!
There is certainly no need to go to great extents to make the prettiest or nicest laundry bag with this process. Just a basic, closable sack is really all you need or want here. If you want to apply flair, ribbon material or who knows what else, you’re welcome to go to these efforts.
Fortunately, making a laundry sack is extremely inexpensive and also easy to do.
Materials:
As with our DIY stuff sack material, we source the ellipse cordlocks and fabric mesh from RockyWoods.com. Seattle Fabrics is another fine choice for materials. For this project, however, you could literally just go down to your local fabric store, pick up virtually any type of material and be on your merry way. The ellipse cordlocks are a little bit more specialized, but you might be able to find these at an outdoor store, military surplus or perhaps a hardware store.
Process:
We use the identical process on our laundry bags as we do our DIY stuff sacks. The only difference is we typically don’t square up the ends when we’re finished as laundry bags typically don’t need to sit upright for any period of time. It’s just a basic fabric bag with a paracord based closure using a standard cordlock.
Mesh fabric typically takes a little bit of finessing to sew correctly. We like to use longer stitches and sometimes zig-zag stiches as our primary means of sewing fabric mesh together. Fortunately, we’re just talking a laundry bag here, so absolute perfection is entirely unnecessary. You just want a place to put your dirty clothes until laundry day!