March 2, 2012

Drawstring Puzzle Bags

While it is later then I wanted, here is the finished project from the earlier sneak peek.






I made drawstring bags with an iron on transfer for the boys puzzles. The storage for the puzzles has morphed over the years.

To start with I consider myself an originalist, or maybe it's a traditionalist, or in the boxist, or maybe in the end it is my undiagnosed OCD; that before kids and probably up until my oldest was about 4 everything and mean everything stayed in its original box and had a spot and it only went in that spot. I know what you are thinking...good God the women is nuts! For me it was a system that worked and things stayed nice and organized this way. However, as I began to experience the joys and the clutter of Motherhood and the second Military move with a child I realized that this method was no longer going to work. The first thing that was downsized was my shoe collection, followed by a very large, over flowing bin of empty, waiting to be recycled DVD cases. My once very large collection now fits into two cases and two binders for Keegan. The only DVDs that remain in their original packaging are our Disney movies, movie/tv series and those collectible DVD's. It is incredible the space that I reclaimed.

After these two big endeavors it became much easier to part with/ downsize things. Next was all the puzzles that Keegan had. I took them out of their boxes, cut off the lid and placed this all in a Ziploc bag that then went into a tote box. I suddenly had an entire shelf back where 25 puzzles used to be.

Fast forward to today with another Military move under our belts and 2 children. Those puzzles were now taking up a box I needed for baby toys coming out of storage and they needed to be relocated somewhere visible yet out of reach of my little one.

Lightbulb!

Drawstring bags of late seem to be all the rage on blogs these days and I thought they will make the perfect home for the puzzles. I knew that I wanted a simple and plain muslin drawstring bag because I knew that I wanted to use iron on transfers to show what was in the bag. My bag size is roughly an 8 x 10 bag.

Here are some great drawstring tutorials here and here. If sewing isn't your thing here are a couple of places that sell all different size bags to fit your every need. 

Celestial Gifts on Etsy
Muslin Bag
State Line Bag Company - Amazon

At first I was going to use the original puzzle image as the image for he bag but I as I looked at what puzzles I had I thought that it would be easier to use a generic image for that product. Hello Google and images. I sorted all the puzzles by their theme and off I went.



When printing images for transfer remember to mirror the image, especially if it has text in it.



Here are all my transfers waiting to be ironed on.The iron on transfer paper that I use is by far the best I have ever used and use it for all my projects. It is called Super Soft Inkjet Transfer Paper sold by Dharma Trading Company. They have a ton of other great products as well. Note for my Canadian followers, they do ship to Canada and to be honest I pay the shipping for this companies products, they are worth it.



Ironing on an image.



Star Wars the Clone Wars



Thomas the Tank Engine -Just to give you an idea of how big these bags are, this bag holds two 40 piece and one 100 piece puzzle and there is still room.



Dinosaurs



A peek inside.



All the bags and their puzzles. Some bags contain multiple puzzles for that theme. So I kept them in their individual Ziploc bags and placed them in the drawstring bag.




2 comments:

ShareThis

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...
Pin It button on image hover