I made this reusable shopping bag patterned after the brown paper bag and added handles. (next time I'm adding some padding to the handles) It can even have a brown paper bag for a liner. Using a paper liner means you don't have to launder the cloth bag as often. A recent segment on a morning news program discussed the cleanliness issues of using reusable shopping bags, laundering and lining them are a couple of solutions. We usually have some of these brown paper bags because when we forget our reusable bags we always ask for paper (where available) because I recycle them in the garden (more on that in a minute). Now they can be reused as liners first and then off to the garden .
Paper bags in the garden: I put them down as a weed barrier and scatter some mulch on top to hide them. They decompose nicely after they do their job and we use less mulch this way.