I’m the kind of person who likes to make things herself. If I buy a handcrafted product I usually try to figure out how I can make it myself and how I can improve it. That’s actually how I got started in the cloth diaper business: I purchased some handmade cloth diapers and after inspecting them I thought “I can do this – better!” So I did.

That’s how I started to make mesh produce bags. One night at the grocery store I came to the horrifying realization that our reusable grocery bags were filled with plastic produce bags! How un-green is that? As soon as we got home I was on the internet researching reusable mesh produce bags.

There were tons and tons of mesh produce bags in different fabrics, sizes, with and without accessories. But I couldn’t bring myself to buy any; I looked at them and thought “I can do that – better!” So I did.

It took a little while. First I had to go through the painful “product development” stage where you try out different ideas and end up with a bunch of crap before you discover what works best.

Finally I came up with what I think are the perfect mesh produce bags. They have that fantastic little pleat that I love in plastic produce bags, are lightweight, are see-through, and best of all – they’re reusable!

Supplies to Make a Mesh Produce Bag

In addition to the usual sewing implements; scissors, thread, pins, etc, you’ll also need:

• Scrubby mesh – don’t use regular tulle or petticoat mesh, they won’t hold up.
• 1/4″ ribbon – I prefer grosgrain, but you can use anything you have lying around.
• Medium-sized safety pin
• Iron and ironing board
• Sewing machine (Obvious I know, but I want to be thorough)
• Serger if you have one – if not you can zig-zag or overcast with your sewing machine.

Ready? Then let’s get started!

Make a Mesh Produce Bag – Step by Step

I did my best to explain each step clearly, and hope the photos help, but if you have any questions please contact me or leave a comment below; I’ll be happy to help!

Step 1: Cut your Mesh

With the mesh folded in half, cut your rectangles so the fold is on the bottom. You can make your mesh produce bags any size you like, but keep in mind that after sewing the finished size will be about 1/2″ narrower across and 1″ shorter than you cut. Here are my cutting dimensions:

• Small: 7.5″ wide x 11″ tall (folded in half – if you unfold it the rectangle would be 7.5″ x 22″)
• Medium: 10.5″ wide x 12.5″ tall (unfolded: 10.5″ x 25″)
• Large: 13.5″ wide by 16″ tall (unfolded: 13.5″ x 32″)

I color-code my bags. Some of my rejects included cute little ribbons with snaps to wrap around rolled-up produce bags, and snap-on carrying pouches for neatly folded or rolled mesh bags. It didn’t take long before I realized that after shopping and putting away groceries I wasn’t about to sit and roll up all these mesh produce bags, or fold them neatly into a pouch. What I actually did was stuff all the produce bags into one of the large mesh produce bags and toss thems into the van with the reusable grocery bags. Color-coding make it easier to grab the right size while we’re shopping.

Step 2: Side Seams

With the fold at the bottom of the bag, serge or stitch up the sides of the bag. Stitch top-to-bottom on one side, but on the other side stop about two inches from the top. This will make the opening for the ribbon closure. If you serged the seams you’ll need to keep this end from unraveling by tying the threads together, or whatever method you use. If you stitched the seams with a sewing machine you may want to zig-zag or overcast the seam for added strength.

That was easy, wasn’t it? Now turn the bag right-side-out.

Step 3: Top Casing
Before ironing your mesh take a scrap piece and do a test to make sure it doesn’t melt your mesh. Mine was fine, but I don’t want you to end up a melted mesh mess.

If your iron and mesh pass the test, carefully press the top edge under – to the inside – about 1/4″. Then fold that edge to the inside so it just barely overlaps the side serging/stitching. Pin in place then press the edge.

Carefully stitch along the fold to create a casing for the ribbon.

Good job! I’ll bet your bag looks something like this one!

Step 4: Bottom Pleats
Most mesh produce bags on the market are simple rectangles like you’ve got now. If you want you could skip ahead to the last step and be done. Personally, I like the bottom pleats because they expand to hold more produce, they allow the bag to sit upright, and they pull the sides of the empty produce bag in so it’s smaller.

To add the pleats you first have to mark bottom fold in the middle. The easiest way to do this is to fold the bag in half side-to-side and make a mark there.

Keeping the back right-side-in, push one corner toward the middle mark, so the seam is directly under the mark. It’s a little tricky, but I know you can do it.

Pin the pleat in place.

Then repeat with the other side so both pleats are pinned in place.

On the right side of the bag, stitch across the bottom about 1/4″ from the fold, catching both pleats in the stitching. Piece of cake!

Yours looks like this, right?

You’re almost done – just one more step.

Step 5: Adding the Ribbon Closure

Measure your ribbon against the bag. You need enough to go around the whole top of the bag plus about 2-3″ on both ends for tying.

Attach the safety pin to one end of the ribbon and insert it in the opening of the casing. Carefully work the safety pin through the casing until it comes out the other opening. Be careful not to pull the other end of the ribbon into the casing. If you do it’s not the end of the world, just pull it all the way through and try again.

Hold the ends together and tie them together. You can cut the ends on the bias (slanty) so they’re less likely to unravel.

Step 6: Done!

To finish my bags I like to lay them out on the ironing board and give them a light pressing to set the pleats and make them nice and flat. You can totally skip this step if you want though.

Using your Mesh Produce Bag

Fill your mesh produce with fresh fruits or veggies and pull the ribbon tight. The grosgrain ribbon has always held well for me, but satin ribbon might slip. You can also tie the ribbon after you pull it tight: just fold it so the knot is against the bag, creating two loops on either side. Take those two loops and tie them into a knot. Pretty slick!

When my mesh produce bags get a little dirty I just swish them through the water when I’m washing dishes and air dry. If they get really nasty I wash them with my laundry on cold then air dry.

Congratulations, you just made a mesh produce bag! Go show everyone you know what a cool produce bag you made, then take a photo and send it to me so I can see too. Go green with mesh produce bags!

First off I have a confession: I’ve never been a fan of peanut butter unless it was an ingredient in cookies or bars. There, I’ve said it and the world hasn’t come to an end. So why would I make peanut butter?

That’s easy – I’m a big fan of Teacher, and Teacher is a big fan of peanut butter. Teacher is such a big fan of peanut butter that he used to joke that I was third in line behind peanut butter and hockey. At least I think he was joking.

But I digress…

Another reason I make peanut butter is because I like doing nice things for my family besides washing their underwear and scrubbing toothpaste out of the sink.

Besides liking Teacher and wanting to do something nice for my family, other reasons to make peanut butter are:

• Making peanut butter is easy-peasy. When I’m in the kitchen I’m all about easy.
• Homemade peanut butter has no trans fats so it’s healthier
• It can be cheaper to make peanut butter, especially if you’re already buying a natural kind.
• Even young kids can help – cheap family entertainment with a built-in snack!
• Best of all, it tastes waaaaay better than store-bought peanut butter! It’s so good I’ve become a peanut butter addict – I eat it right off a spoon, or a finger if there’s no clean spoons around, which happens embarrassingly often around here.

OK, enough chit-chat, let’s get to business with Z-Man and make some healthy best-you’ve-ever-eaten-in-your-whole-lifetime peanut butter! (drum roll please)

How to Make Peanut Butter – With Pictures

First, roast your peanuts in the oven for about 15 minutes. They’ll continue to cook a bit after you take them out so don’t let them get too dark.

Be sure to use Spanish peanuts, not Virginia peanuts. I tried Virginia peanuts the first time and ended up with ground peanuts instead of peanut butter. It probably didn’t help the texture that I was using a wooden chopstick to poke the ground peanut mountains down in a futile effort to make them turn into butter. When the chopstick hit the blade and lost an inch I knew that batch was doomed.

They smell amazing – my mouth is starting to water already!

Let the peanuts cool, then grab a handful of peanuts and rub them between your palms over a salad spinner. Let any loose skins fall into the spinner with the nuts. Don’t worry if you miss some of the peanuts; you can rub them again later or just leave the skins on. You don’t even have to remove the skins if you don’t want to; they’ll add another flavor.

I learned this trick from Alton Brown. He’s my hero… or he would be if I cooked regularly. I like to watch him on TV, does that count?

Give the peanuts a whirl in the salad spinner to pull the loose skins away. I usually empty the bowl a couple of times so there’s not a big build-up of skins in there. Now’s the time to loosen any peanut skins that you missed the first time around.

Z-Man was fascinated with the peanut skins. “They look like Fall!” he said. He was also very concerned about what we would do with the skins. I guess he took our recycling and talk about not wasting things to heart. He thought up different ways to use the skins for the longest time. “We could glue them on trees for Fall leaves.” he suggested. “We could put them in the macaroni and cheese table.” He means the sensory table which currently is filled with dry macaroni – no cheese. “We could throw them in the air and catch them.” There were a ton more ideas I don’t remember. I’m probably a bad mom for forgetting.

What actually happened is that I distracted him and threw them in the sink when he wasn’t looking. I’m definitely a bad mom.

When your peanuts are all de-skinned make sure the blade is in the food processor – it doesn’t work otherwise – and put the peanuts in. Add the honey and salt.

You can adjust the amount of honey and salt to suit your taste. Teacher likes his with without honey, I like mine really sweet so I make my peanut butter with honey-roasted peanuts.

Put on the lid and process for about a minute, then scrape down the sides.

Be careful not to nick your finger or spatula with the blades; my spatulas all carry the scars of careless scraping. I’m slightly more careful with my fingers.

Start the processor again and slowly drizzle in the oil. Keep processing until it’s smooth enough for you.

Some of the recipes I researched said to process “another 2-3 minutes” but it took my processor longer than that to make our peanut butter smooth enough.

By now the smell is probably driving you crazy so go ahead and take a taste. You can add more honey or salt and process longer if you want.

Doesn’t it look delish? Quick – gimme a spoon!

Ack! Z-man stole my spoon! He sure loves it though.

Another reason to make peanut butter: kids think everything tastes better when they help make it. It’s a proven fact.

Store your peanut butter in a jar in the refrigerator. I’ve read that it will keep for up to two months, but with so many peanut butter eatin’ kids around here ours lasts about a week.

Enjoy!

How to Make Peanut Butter – the Official Recipe

1 15 oz bag raw Spanish peanuts
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp honey (or more to taste)
1-1 1/2 Tbsp peanut oil

Spread the peanuts on a baking sheet and roast at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes. Allow to cool. Rub peanuts between your palms over a salad spinner to loosen the skins. Spin the salad spinner to separate the skins from the peanuts. Put the peanuts into the bowl of a food processor. Add the salt and honey, put on the lid, then process for 1 minute. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and replace the lid. Process again, while drizzling in the oil. Continue processing until the mixture is smooth. Transfer the peanut butter to an airtight container and store in the refrigerator for up to 2 months.

How to Make Amy Sue’s Honey Roasted Peanut Butter

(aka “The easiest-peasiest yummiest peanut butter recipe ever”)

12 oz honey-roasted peanuts
1 Tbsp peanut oil
Put peanuts in food processor. Process 1 minute. Scrape down sides of bowl. Process again, drizzling in the oil. Keep processing until it’s smooth. Store in an airtight container for up to 2 months. Done.

By the way, were you observant enough to notice that the food processor bowl already had peanut butter all over it the first time you saw it? That’s because we’d already made a batch of honey-roasted peanut butter. YUM!!

Happy peanut butter making!

OK, I admit right off the bat that I took this idea from my friend, Pietra of Homestead Emporium. I really don’t think she’ll mind though because I’m only making them for myself and the girls: I don’t serge small circles like this well enough to think about selling them (as you can see). But that’s OK, they don’t have to be perfect for me; I’m just excited to find another way to use some of the gorgeous fabrics I have leftover from making diapers.

There’s nothing I hate more than wasting fabric so I’ve been keeping all my scraps to make cloth pads and nursing pads but there’s only so many of those that you need – especially if you’re not nursing anymore. I did make some nursing pads for Princess but need more practice on those too. Luckily she doesn’t mind if some of the circles are a bit wonky. It’s frustrating that I can’t serge as well as I sew, but since I’ve been sewing waaaay longer than I’ve been serging it makes sense. I don’t have to like it though. But I digress…

Getting back on track: I took photos of Pietra’s and my cotton rounds. In case you can’t tell, Pietra’s are on the top. There were 10 rounds but one went AWOL before the photo shoot. Her girls do all the work for them, including taking the photos and shipping, except the actual serging. I think that’s SO cool! My girls help me whenever they have time – they especially like tearing out the stabilizer behind appliques and helping to package orders – but they don’t have a product all their own. I was going to teach them to serge so they could do wipes and such but whenever I had time they didn’t and vice versa. Oops, I’m digressing again…

The bottom photo are the ones I made; obviously. They got better as I went along and figured out which side is best to have up (the dyed side) and what settings to have the serger on (for my serger it’s the longest stitch length and neutral width). They’re not as perfect as Pietra’s, but I like them anyway.

Another disposable product eliminated from our household! After switching to cloth napkins, washcloths instead of paper towels for the daycare, reusable shopping bags, cloth pads, containers instead of ziploc bags for food storage, and now reusable cotton balls, I’m running out of ideas. Paper towels? Maybe, but we reserve those for gross things we don’t want to see again – like cat puke. Q-tips? I haven’t figured out how to do those “green” yet. Family cloth? Not likely – I likes my toilet paper!

If you’ve been reading my blog you’ll know that Teacher and I are trying to make green choices whenever we can. That’s why I was so excited to discover that our hosting company, Elemental Muse, is using the wind to power its servers!

Read all the details in Elemental Muse’s blog, then take a moment to calculate your carbon footprint.

Kermit sure had it right when he sang “It’s not easy being green…” Of course, if you’ve seen Sesame Street recently you’ll know that Oscar sings it too, but in my mind it’ll always be Kermie’s song. Teacher and I are discovering just how challenging it is to be green as we try to “greenify” our family.

A loooooong time ago we started going green by using cloth diapers, but that had more to do with being poor than with the environment. More recently we’ve made changes to provide a more healthy home for ourselves and our children, and to help the environment. The fact that we save money is an added bonus!

First we traded chemical cleaners for baking soda and white vinegar. I was always worried about one of the kids getting into a cleaning cupboard by accident, but now I don’t worry so much. To be honest, it took a little while to get used to the sour scent of vinegar when I cleaned, but now the smell means “clean” to me. I could go on and on about how wonderful baking soda and vinegar are, but that’s another subject.

Then we decided to switch from plastic and paper bags to reusable bags. One of the co-ops I’m a member of had some produce and string EcoBags leftover from a co-op. I bought some without telling Teacher – I wanted to surprise him. The same day that the EcoBags arrived in the mail Teacher came home from the grocery store with a bunch of their reusable bags – for less than 1/2 the price I paid for my EcoBags! Mine are much cuter though… at least the string bags are, the produce ones are kinda boring. We’ love our reusable bags! They’re really easy to use… as long as when you bring them into the house filled with stuff, you remember to take them back out to the van before Teacher goes to school so you can use them again. And when you get to the store you need to remember to bring them inside the store instead of leaving them in the van. But once you get the hang of those two little things you’ll be good to go!

Of course nothing can be too easy… remembering to use our new bags caused a new problem – we used up all our plastic grocery bags. I know that sounds like a good thing, but we use plastic grocery bags a lot in our house. They line the garbage cans in all four bedrooms and three bathrooms, not to mention they’re perfect for blow-out diapers and sending the clothes that were a casualty of the blow-out diapers home with daycare parents. Trust me, you do NOT want to be out of plastic grocery bags when facing a 10 month old’s blow out!

The grocery stores used our bags without a problem, but we didn’t get such a warm reception at other stores. Some cashiers forgot to use them until our items were already in plastic. Then they’d put the plastic bag inside our cloth bag – what’s the sense of that?! Then there were the cashiers that gave us The Look when we asked them to use our bags. You know The Look – the one that lets you know without a doubt that you’re just plain nuts. Yeah, I can handle The Look, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy it.

The most recent green thing we’ve done is switching to cloth napkins. This was my brainchild, but Teacher has been sweet enough to go along with it. One day I counted up how many paper napkins I was going through a week with the daycare – it was over 60 napkins, not counting our family’s use! From that moment I was obsessed with the idea of switching to cloth diapers, but being as thrifty cheap! as I am, I didn’t want to buy them when I could easily make them. I decided to use knit fabric because it would be thicker than woven, yet wouldn’t pill like flannel. And one of my favorite co-ops had really cute knits really cheap so it wouldn’t cost a ton to make the switch. But when push came to shove I decided I really didn’t want to take time out of my diaper sewing to make napkins, so Gretchen of Small Wonders Wipes agreed to serge them up for me – at a reasonable rate. The resulting cloth napkins are adorable and the daycare kids love them – they even fight over who gets to fold them for me!

Of course, not everyone is as excited about our green-ness as we are. Teacher and I recently had my whole family over to celebrate Angel Face’s birthday. My whole family is Grandma, Grandpa, Uncle Jon, Uncle Mike, Uncle Mike’s wife, and their two boys. We put the cloth napkins out for dinner, and when my sister-in-law asked for napkins and one of the kids pointed to the cloth ones. OK, I admit they’re a bit unusual, being kid-themed. Eventually we’ll get “real” ones for family use, but for now this is it. She looked at them and said “Ohh Kaay…” in The Voice. You know The Voice – the one that lets you know that you’re crazy no matter what words are being said. I wonder what she’d say if she knew the girls and I use cloth pads? But that’s a topic for another time…

It sure isn’t easy being green!