I love reusable items, it reduces the cost since you’re not continually purchasing a disposable product.

We use a lot of reusable items in our household. Let’s see… we use stainless steel straws, reusable filters. Regarding food consumption you won’t see too me buying too many packaged meals since (for me anyway) I find it wasteful and I can make my own prepackaged meals, toss in the freezer to be consumed at a later day. When my daughter was an infant I made reusable cloth wipes, those were perfect for cleaning messes that accompanied my baby girl and I had the added convenience of reusing them… after they were washed of course!.

My daughter prefers the lunches I prepare for her over a school bought lunch. Because of this, I pack lunches several times weekly.  But I was placing the food items into disposable plastic bags. I think it’s time that I upgrade them to reusable sandwich and snack bags, don’t you?

Reusable sandwich & snack bags

Take a look at my daughter’s new sandwich and snack bags. Washable, durable and what’s great is this eliminates so much dependence on disposable sandwich/snack bags.

Playing around with decorative stitch (see the little holes) on the muslin.

I combined two fabrics with this one. The  cream colored flap flips over to close the bag — just like the plastic sandwich bags I’ve purchased. When my daughter saw the completed bags her first comment was… “Mom, these are too pretty to use for my sandwich and snacks!” But I told her that this was just the beginning, I’d be making her other embroidered items with my Brother SE-400, that made her happy.

I did everything on this machine, mainly because I want to get more acquainted with the embroidery features and I wanted to play around with some of the regular stitch functions too. It has 67 stitches, which isn’t bad for an embroidery machine. However, I won’t be using this for sewing. I have other machines that fit that purpose. This was purchased solely for it’s embroidery function.

I finally played around with different embroidery thread.

As you can see in the picture, I finally used more than one color of embroidery thread. The above cats are a big improvement over my first, remember that machine embroidered cat? It was all one color. But I still could have done better with the above embroidery. It’s puckering a bit between the embroidered cats and that’s because I needed to use a thicker stabilizer for this muslin fabric. I learned that after I saw it happening, heh. 😉 I’m still learning though and am thrilled with my progress.

The reusable bags are completed and now they’ll be washed and pressed and then they’ll be used in my daughter’s lunch bag on Monday. She already told me that her classmates will most likely want them after seeing hers.