Oh…the lunch box. A few years ago I did my research and found that Thermos brand was supposed to be one of the less chemically brands of soft lunch boxes. Now they are not so sure. The new word on the street is they are made with PVC and perhaps, just maybe, a tad bit of lead. So…back to the research lab for a PVC, phthalate, and lead free cold food transporter. This is what I found. (Crocodile Creek has a ton of really cute designs and can be found on Amazon for about $15 and free shipping.)
Yes…yes…there is a sewing project in here somewhere. Now that I have managed to find a perfectly normal looking lunch box that won’t actually poison my child, how can I manage to further ecogeek up his day? By rummaging my fabric pile and creating reusable everything. The Green Peace bag I didn’t make, but did add little handles out of leftover elastic banding to make it easier for my son to carry. Once my lunch bag – now his snack bag. The Buzz Lightyear pretzel/cracker pouch, a basic drawstring bag, was the pant leg of a pair of unsaveable PJs. The Spider Man cookie pouch was from torn swimming shorts. (I use the ready made pocket for Mama Notes. Yes…I am totally one of those moms.) No I won’t be selling any of these on Etsy because of copyrite laws, blah blah blah. The blue and orange sandwich bags are just basic hemmed scrap squares sewn together. I did not even line these with any sort of plastic or vinyl because I made enough to be able to machine wash them after each use. So far they have done their job as sandwich wranglers quite well. I will also be making some cloth napkins out of a few old plaid dress shirts. You could use the same basic square napkins to wrap up sandwiches and double as placemats.

Again…as with the Back Up Band…these are all really easy, beginner level sewing projects that anyone can do and everyone has the materials cluttering up the house. If you, or your kids, take your lunch, take a moment and see what disposables you could replace with cotton reusables. Even if you are all thumbs when it comes to sewing you may just impress yourself & your offspring with what you create. Just try not to sew yourself to the actual lunch box. That might not be quite as impressive.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 6:25 am and is filed under family, product review, recycling, sewing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.