Showing posts with label eco conscious. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eco conscious. Show all posts

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Annual Earth Day Sale on Now!




I can't believe it's been over a year since I opened up my Etsy shop with all of my reusable cloth lunch bags, snack and sandwich bags and more! Plus this is my second Earth Day Sale so I guess it's now officially an 'annual' sale *grin*.

So in celebration of Earth Day today I'm offering 10% Off (before shipping) on all of my reusable cloth 'snack' and 'sandwich' bags!! Discount will be refunded back to you via Paypal after the sale is complete. Let's help save the Earth together :)



~ Rosina


Thursday, April 1, 2010

Because Not All Sandwiches Are Created Equal



Somewhere between Tuesday and now nearly Friday I lost a day *grin*. I can't believe how fast this week has gone by and that we're in April already!! I've been a busy little bee sewing up my secret Easter gifts for the kids and filling orders for my reusable cloth lunch items.

We've been using my snack and sandwich bags for a couple of years now and absolutely love them. Especially that we're no longer storing our food inside plastic. No plastic, PVC or nylon liners for us. Just unbleached cotton and recently I've started adding certified organic bags to our stash to but once in a while we've got a sandwich or a 'man'wich as I like to call them that just won't fit comfortably inside!

My husband is a big culprit of this and maybe your husband is the same. He LOVES to stack like half a roast between two slices of bread and call it a sandwich *grin*. Myself on the other hand, I love to load up on more of the veggies like sprouts, tomatoes, onion and such and by the time we're done quite often they're fairly large sandwiches. They'll go into the cloth bags and then put up a fuss on the way out so you end up squishing your sammy!



So I've come up with a solution... a sandwich wrap! It works beautifully :) You just place your man sized sandwich on it and fold up the cloth around it. Plus when it's time to eat it you can use it as your place mat to eat over and a napkin to wipe up your hands and perhaps your face with after *grin*.

My goal.... to save the world one cloth sandwich wrap at a time!

~ Rosina

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Give Life To Outgrown Clothes ~ Make Your Own Cloth Napkins

sewing napkins

I'm slowly phasing out all of the paper towels and napkins out of our home, replacing them with cloth napkins and the stash of flannel in my sewing cupboard is finally getting put to good use making lovely soft napkins that the kids love to use :)

sewing napkins

But I started thinking about what else I could find around the house to reuse and give new life to in the form of napkins. With three kids growing like weeds there's never a shortage of to tight pajamas or ones that accidentally got snagged on something and blew out a knee *grin*. So instead of throwing them in the rag bag I dug them out, washed them all up and headed to the cutting table.

sewing napkins

By snipping off the waistbands and cuffs and cutting out all of the seams I was left with 4 panels. Slightly odd in shape but very usable!

sewing napkins

With my rotary cutter & ruler I trimmed them up so that they had nice straight edges. A few of them had ripped knees so I had to trim them a little shorter but out of my 4 year olds pj's I was able to get a good sized 6 x 13 inch rectangle out of most of the flannel panels.

I don't get to use my serger very often so I was excited to be able to stitch, trim & hem all of the sides in seconds *grin*. Boy does that thing zip along! And it just happened that Sew Mama Sew blogged about making napkins using a rolled hem stitch with a serger so I got to brush up on my technique with her handy tutorial :)

sewing napkins

The only drawback to using my serger is those darn thread tails that it leaves behind. A quick fix is to either trim off those tails and dab fray stop or another liquid sewing glue on the corners to hold the threads together permanently or sew them in like I did in the above photo.

I thought that since they are going to get a lot washing with all of the dirty hand wiping that I'd make sure they were never going to come undone. So I took an embroidery thread with a large eye and threaded the tail through the end and then ran it back through about an inch of stitches :)

I love it! New life to old pajamas keeping them out of the landfill and those favorite pj's that your kid insisted on wearing every night to bed because he loved them sooo much are back *grin*.

Have fun reusing something out of your outgrown stash of clothes :)

~ Rosina