My Accidental Discovery for a Cheap Alternative to Space Bags

So as you know my Clutter personality is Easy Distracted and Procrastinator ...hence why I haven't yet finished Decluttering, Organizing and Storing my SCARFS.  My biggest problem is that is its still cold here in NYC and I still need Scarfs and I can't decide which one's I'm actually going to pack in my move.


I also don't know where I'm going to store them as of now and but they do need to be in airtight bag or container.  But I don't think I'm going to buy more space bags because they are super expensive!  I do love them but I want to a avoid paying $3-4 for a space bag unless I really really need it.  But I love them because they air tight seal my more Moth attracting things like sweaters and scarfs.  So I was thinking that maybe I can try making a airtight bag to store my yet to be fully grouped and organized scarfs. And here's what I came up with.

I put my scarf in a plastic bag and decided to iron it shut since I didn't want to buy more expensive gallon size ziplock bags.  I took a rag and placed it so that it covered the edges of the scarf in the bag and would give me enough surface room to iron the bag shut. ** You do this because your iron can't touch the actual plastic bag it will singe and create a mess on your iron. And then I would move my iron to create the about 75% of the seal.  You want to check on the plastic beneath to make sure it sealed tight because if you over do it, it will singe.  Then I'd compress the bag as much as I could and seal the rest.

And it worked, if you put pressure you can see the air that can't escape.  So great solution for sealing my scarfs in air tight bag and isolating the dust loving scarfs which could be a moth target.  As I did more, I realized that it would be much more space saving if I could do a better job of getting rid of the air like those food vacuum seal machines.

So I grabbed two heavy text books and used that as a press and ironed as I did above.  And look at the results!!!

BEFORE

AFTER 

Like a Space Bag the results aren't really dramatic on dense things.

What I love about this is that it's airtight and the end result is slightly more condensed and creates a super cool stackable shape just like my space bags!!

I realize that Space bags are superior because their bags are much stronger so they can compress more.  But Space Bags are a little weak at condensing super thick items like bulky sweaters and things like cotton shirts because the limitation on compression is the actual thickness of the object.  They are best on Comforters, Pillows and fluffy things like winter bubble jackets.  So for my purposes this is a great alternative to Space Bags because I'm using this method for things the Space Bags don't do a great job of compressing anyways.  And I have more options of isolating pieces. Like now instead of mixing my silk dress shirts with regular fabrics because Space Bags don't come in super small sizes, I can isolate the silks in airtight bags. 


SO NOW.. I can just put all the scarfs in a separate Garbage Bag till I'm ready to find them a final storage space.