A Bag Full of Bags

I have a lovely fabric handbag that I bought years ago from a gorgeous woman who made it from left-over upholstery fabric. It is large and capacious and fits lots of useful stuff in it which is both a blessing and a curse. It tends to accumulate All The Things with alarming rapidity, and then I can find nothing and spend minutes at the checkout hunting for my purse, and hoping against hope that I won't send a shower of tampons, receipts and my library book onto the floor before I find it, and then I spend more minutes standing in the rain/blazing hot sun in the car park while I hunt for my keys.

In order to mitigate this handbag craziness I was recently inspired to pop my indispensable handbag treasures into separate little bags. I am loving this plan because now what falls out of my bag onto the floor is sweet little other bags, and also, I can now find my keys.

What is in my Hand Bag:
Clockwise from top left: 1 A drawstring bag containing 8 more drawstring bags - light-as-air Onya produce bags. A friend gave me these for my birthday a couple of years ago. Since then I have also passed them on as gifts. I like that they are made from recycled plastic bottles. I have not collected a plastic produce bag for a couple of years now, but the extraordinary thing is that I am just now coming to the end of my collection of plastic produce bags stashed under the sink..
2 A fold up reusable bag, this one a Christmas present from The Girl, also a couple of years ago.
3 My lovely leather wallet that I have owned for going on 12 years now. I had the zip replaced once by my favourite shoe-repair man, who can fix almost anything.
4 This little zip-up purse was a hand-me-down from a friend. This is where I stash the grocery money.
5 The red heart-shaped purse is sewn all over with tiny red beads and is one of my favourites. I found it sopping wet in the gutter in the middle of a rain storm. I brought it home and washed it and now it has a new life preventing showers of tampons raining down upon the checkout counter. It is doing very well at this job.
6 A pencil. When I left my job as a teacher assistant I took home all the used pencils from the Prep classroom as it was the end of the year and the teacher was going to throw them away. I now have quite the collection of easy-grip pencils, and have no excuse not to form my letters correctly.
7 My shopping list!
8 A tiny tape measure that came with a magazine I bought a good decade ago. Endlessly useful for measuring furniture in op-shops to see if it will fit in my house. Also used it in a gardening job last week when I forgot to bring a proper one. I felt ridiculous measuring garden edging with a tiny 1 metre tape measure!
9 My diary. Because I haven't worked out how to use my phone calendar yet. Luckily I don't have to do that until 2020 now:)
10 Sunglasses case. When Posy was seven she had a temper tantrum at the optometrist's because Rosy got to have glasses and she didn't. They rewarded her by letting her choose a glasses case..
11 This is a little Japanese fabric bag that Posy doesn't want any more. It contains tissues, a fold-up hairbrush that came in an airline freebie bag, band-aids, lip balm, and is a useful place to stash tiny important things - hair bands I find on the street, chocolate I don't want to share..

So that is what is in my bag, along with phone, keys and water bottle.

Tell me about the important things you lug around with you on a daily basis. Are you a minimalist, or are you prepared for the apocalypse? Are you happy with your bag solution, or still searching for hand bag nirvana? I have ended up with a bag full of bags, but am quite pleased to have found a practical solution to my hand bag clutter, and especially pleased that it did not involve spending any money, and did involve using things I had stashed in drawers. That, for me, is a good day's work.