crafting with blendy & becky: rice heat therapy bag

The title of this post should actually be "Crafting with Susan & Becky"—when I told Blendy I wanted to make these rice therapy bags (discovered through Pinterest, of course) for our April craft project, she politely declined. So I turned to the woman whose help I would have needed to enlist anyway: my mom!

I think the last time I used a sewing machine, I was a freshman in high school. The sewing part of Home Ec was rather tramatic for me—we were required to make items of clothing and then wear them to school. This was bad enough on its own, but the day I chose to wear my terrible plaid jumper was also a day I stayed after school to work on yearbook. So did my cousin, who was responsible for the yearbook page of the yearbook ... and she took a picture of me working on my spread. So my horrible jumper is now immortalized on the pages of The Reflector. After that experience, I swore off sewing ... until now!

Apparently, when I swore off sewing, I really swore it off because I remembered virtually nothing. My mom had to basically hold my hand the whole way through—from cutting out the fabric to pinning it together to threading the sewing machine to actually sewing!

If you want detailed instructions, you should really go to "Sew, Mama, Sew!"—the site that inspired me. They give great directions! I didn't really follow their directions, though—I needed something simpler. So here's what I did ...

Find a fun fabric for your bag. Or you could do what I did and raid your mom's fabric scraps! (I didn't care if my bag was particularly beautiful ... after all, I was going to be the one sewing it!)

Cut fabric into approximately 8x20 inch rectangle. Fold in half to create 8x10 inch rectangle. If you have a fabric that doesn't look the same on both sides, be sure to fold so the right sides (what will be on the outside at the end) are together.

Pin on the three non-folded sides. Leave about four inches unpinned.

Sew. Try to keep your lines straight. (I was very bad at this.) Be sure not to sew the unpinned section.

Trim the edges and turn the fabric right side out.

Pour two pounds of rice into a bowl. Add 10-ish drops of essential oil and stir together. (You may need more or less—adjust until it smells right to you. I went WAY overboard with my cinnamon bark. Repeat after me: Less is more!)

Carefully fill bag with rice.

Stitch the hole closed. (Sorry, I can't give better directions for that—I did what Mom told me to do, but I don't think I can accurately describe it!)

To use your bag, heat it in the microwave in 30-second increments until it's as warm as you'd like.

Enjoy!

Note: This really was my April craft, and I did everything up to the rice part in April. It just took me a while to get my essential oils, so I finished in May.