Homemade Gifts

Sew Simple Homemade Gifts

I made the original sewing pattern and posted the directions to sew a  tea towel clothes peg bag (or clothespin bag) about five years ago, I think. After all that time, the original peg bag was bleached completely by the sun, so I was due for a replacement. I checked out my own peg bag sewing pattern yesterday and was chuffed because it made sewing up a new one so easy.

I’m going to buy a few pretty tea towels today and make up some of these peg bags as homemade gifts. They are so simple, but really useful when you’re hanging out the wash. As an alternative, if you have an outgrown baby or toddler dress with a wide neck opening, you can simply sew the hem and the end of the sleeves closed, slip it on a hanger, add the clothespins, em>et voilà!

Another nice little gift to sew is this fabric hand towel topper. The neat thing about sewing this project is that you just trace around the shape of your iron to make the pattern. The triangular top is folded over a dowel or towel rod, then fastened with velcro.

Handy in the kitchen, or in the sewing room, these pot holder pouches are super simple to make if you use purchased pot holders as the base. You can use fabric glue or hot glue to hold the pouches together, so technically, I suppose, they aren’t a sewing project at all. However, you could also hand stitch the opening together, so then it would count as home sewn!

One of my favorite homemade gifts to sew are rice hot packs, both the original segmented tube rice pack or the Faux Hot Water Bottle Rice Pack, shown at left. The tube versions are made from long rectangles of fabric sewn into a tube then filled with rice. You sew a few seams across the tube to create rice-filled segments; this keeps the rice distributed along the entire length. To use, you just microwave the rice pack for a couple of minutes – it is absolutely amazing how long these rice packs will retain heat, and they are great for preheating the bed on a cold night, or for wrapping around your neck when you’re sick with the flu.

I gave  a bunch of these rice packs as homemade Christmas gifts, and many of the people who received them asked me to make some more.  My mom wanted the rice pack to feel like an old-fashioned hot water bottle, so I traced around a hot water bottle to make a pattern. There is a printable version of this template available on the rice hot pack page. Oh, one nice addition – you can also add a few lavender buds or other fragrant herbs to the rice, or scent it with a few drops of your favorite essential oil.