My feet and hands get cold before anything else when I ride my bicycle in cold weather. I also avoid buying bicycle specific clothing, preferring to use things I already have. Sometimes I buy things from the hunting section of a sporting goods department. Hunters need to stay warm in cold weather, too. My winter cycling shoes are a pair of walking shoes with leather uppers. They have more padding and are warmer than the canvas shoes I use in mild weather.
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Signing UpStep 1: Learn from the homeless
The homeless use newspapers to stay warm in the winter. I find four plies to be just about right. More plies do not really help.
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What I find works moderately well for me is to use a thick (2mm) pair of polyester/spandex gloves, with some cheap army surplus wool liners pulled over. My hands are not warm by any stretch of the imagination, but allow a great deal of finesse with the bicycle controls. Some spare bar tape keeps my hands from sliding around the bar ends.
http://www.oism.org/nwss/s73p926.htm
Cresson H. Kearny wrote the book on nuclear survival skills. The linked to page shows the author emerging from a trench shelter wearing improvised clothing made mostly of newspaper.
This is a bit more hardcore than you are doing, but I'm going to guess you will find the link interesting.
~~ I'd use a thin sock (wool, silk, cotton) to keep the plastic away from my feet. I'd cut a garbage bag in half, vertically, and lay one of the halves down on the floor on its "edge", and stick my toes into the corner, aligning the center of my foot along the "edge". (By "edge" I mean the edge of the uncut, unfolded bag, if you held it upright by the top corners.) Begin with the part of the bag that's over your toes and flatten it against the top of your foot, and then bring up the part of the bag that's behind your foot, and wrap it around your ankles from the rear. Put your thick sock over it all. When putting on your shoes, be careful not to poke your toes through the plastic, and with a little careful forward-and-back sliding, try to leave a little slack in the plastic and the thick sock at the toes, so you're feet aren't all squeezed by the plastic, and so you don't poke a hole in it. And you don't want to stretch the thick sock so tight that it doesn't insulate. This the most important thing here is not to rip or poke through the plastic. This can be a little tricky at first.
~~ This will keep your feet warm when it's really, really cold, but it will leave your feet a little funky at the end of the day, even if you're outdoors in temps lower than 20 degrees F. If you're going to be indoors all day, yuck! So if you're commuting to work, take a change of socks and shoes, and re-do the bag thing for the way home.
~~ Getting your insulation wet from the outside defeats it just as much as wetting it from the inside. Waterproof boots are required in wet conditions.
~~ Your feet and your head can release a lot of body heat, so a warm hat is important too. Wool is better than synthetics here. If you spend a lot of time outdoors on cold days, your body acclimates itself, and the heat you retain at your feet and head (and elsewhere, but the rest is easier to keep warm) can aid your body in warming your hands, which helps when you have to limit your gloves for dexterity. In fact, we used to omit the gloves altogether, and people would drive by and think we were crazy for working without gloves in windy 20-degree weather, but we were comfortable.
~~ This technique works too well to use when the temperature is much above freezing, so it's only for the really cold days. Which is fine, since it's kind of a pain in the neck to set it up.
~~ Silk long johns are awesome for cold-weather activity, not only because they keep you warm, but because they slide against your outer layers better than most other fabrics, and you don't get so fatigued by struggling against binding clothing, an obvious benefit for cycling.