Three of Mr. Snuggles’ college friends celebrated their birthdays last January and we both thought it would be nice to give them handmade gifts. I wanted to make a huge shopping bag made out of recycled flour bags (you’ll see in the future that they’re my favorite material simply because they’re recycled, cheap and the texture is just so natural and raw!).

However, we wanted to give them something more unique than the classic shoulder bag so we opted for heat bags filled with rice, dried lavender petals and lavender essential oil.

For the filling, we used white rice and not brown rice as it can rot in time as you use them. You can also use flax seeds, oatmeal, etc. but I have found that rice is the best filling for me. I’ve tried flax seed but the scent was too nutty when heated in the microwave that it overpowered the essential oil. Rice has this certain “earth” scent that I just love.

There is no exact measurement for these because it all depends on how you want your bag to feel and smell like. In our case, we used 2 to 2 and a half teaspoons of lavender essential oil for 2 kilos of white rice and about 500gms-600gms of white rice on each bag. I wish I could take a photo of the scent because it was so relaxing and therapeutic!

I stitched two pieces of 8 x 5 inch cloth cut from my flour bag. You can only use cotton cloth for this project because that’s the safest cloth for the microwave, so make a mental note when you buy cloth.

You can also use textiles that have designs or you can stencil your own design. As you can see, I stenciled my own bamboo pattern on my rice heat bag using textile paint. I’ll tell you more about how I stenciled mine on a later post. I stenciled the design first on the bag and then stitched the sides.

The instructions are printed on a small piece of multipurpose board and tied to the bag using Abaca string. I love how natural it looked. Will update this post soon and include a printable instruction sheet. Download the printable instruction sheet here.

And we wrapped them in onion skin and clear cello, ready for the gift giving.

Of course I couldn’t resist not making one for myself. haha. I designed a slightly different stencil just for this. Unfortunately, my Aunt loved it and I gave it to her as a gift instead.

Enjoy making your own heat bags!

I am linking this to:

Sumo’s Sweet Stuff

Get Your Craft On Tuesday @ Today’s Creative Blog

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