june at noon

Happy New Year! I’m back with more Christmas gift photos!

I’ve seen some really neat variations on the reusable lunch bag and other food storage items, and I knew of two people who would be able to use and appreciate something like this. So I set out to make two lunch sets. (Lots more photos to be found on my flickr page.)

I made:

Four cloth napkins. Two were simple squares cut to the same size as a standard paper napkin and hemmed. Two were “real” cloth napkins I had in a set that I no longer use; I embroidered them with the recipients’ initials.

Four snack baggies. Two are lined with fabric and close with velcro. Two are lined with food-grade plastic sandwich bags. They can be washed and reused like the others and will hold in any food that might be a little messy. I don’t know how long the plastic will hold up with reuse, but it would be easy to replace it over time.

(I did not take into account the fact that a clear lining meant all my raw edges and thread ends would be visible. Next time I will probably neaten that up a bit more!)

Two sandwich wraps. They’re lined with more food-grade plastic, which I procured by cutting open a large freezer-size plastic bag. They’re simple squares with velcro on the four corners to close them. You can find a similar pattern here.

Two lunch bags, made brown paper bag style. I used some black zigzag stitching to mimic the pinked edges of a real paper bag, and I embroidered the recipients’ names with black perle cotton to look like they were written on with marker. There are a lot of similar patterns available, and I sort of combined all of them to make my own. The two I liked most are this and this.

My goal was to make these sets using items I already had on hand, in order to make the gifts even more true to the whole “green” idea. I am happy to say I succeeded, with the exception of a bit of velcro.

All of the fabrics came out of my stash, some of them items that had been cut into and left to languish in the scrap pile. I can’t tell you how excited I was to discover I had two pieces of brown twill that were exactly the right sizes for the lunch bags! I can’t even remember why I had the twill in my stash.

I love the idea of using so many different fabrics for a mismatched look and the fact that all of these items can be washed and used over and over. Who wouldn’t enjoy their lunch just a little bit more using these lunch sets?