DIY Life

Strap a brown-bag lunch to your wheels and head off to work. According to GreenYour.com, restaurants produce over 50,000 pounds of trash per year and consume more energy per square foot than any other U.S. industry. By steering clear of restaurants during your workweek, you can be part of a small change to decreasing both of those numbers (and probably decreasing another number while you're at it--- those dreaded numbers on your bathroom scale).

Luckily for you, reusable lunch bags are cuter than ever, and with this tutorial from Evil Mad Scientist, you can create your own over the weekend, green-ifying your work ritual by Monday.

Don't bike to work? The reusable bag is the perfect size for a weekend biking jaunt-- just right for nestling your keys, wallet and perhaps a great book to take to the park. Sure beats a plastic bag, and you're guaranteed the cutest bike on the block.

Now that you are wrapping your sandwiches in an eco-friendly vinyl wrap, you can go a step further and carry those wrapped sandwiches in a neat woodgrain oilcloth lunch bag, courtesy of Derek and Lauren over at Design*Sponge.

To make the lunch bag, you'll need 1/2 yard woodgrain oilcloth, scissors, a sewing machine, thread, a ruler, and Velcro sticky dots. Derek and Lauren cut the pine woodgrain into three pieces, then sewed the pieces together. After turning the bag right side out, they attached the Velcro sticky dots, and the job was complete.

While many of the commenters like the oilcloth bag, a few think that the lunch bag really isn't eco-friendly at all. I think the bag is awful cute, and would argue the fact that if you use the bag every day, then it really is environmentally friendly, simply because you aren't using and tossing a paper bag every day.

I'm an adoptive mom, so I spend a lot (read: far, far, too much) time checking out other adoption blogs. One of my favorites is Do They Have Salsa in China? To keep her two little girls interested in eating healthfully, the blog's creative author has delved into bento boxes.

We've posted about the art of packing bento boxes before. Common in Japanese cuisine, bento is a single-portion meal that is often beautifully arranged -- food that is not only pleasing to the palate, but also to the eye. You can make bento boxes a toddler favorite with a few simple twists that I'll share after the break.

Rubber bands have come up many times in our DIY posts. They are one of those project necessities, serving multiple functions and hosting some of the most creative hacks. I have a little baggie of elastic bands in my junk drawer. They always come in handy, but typically, for simple uses. Consider these slamming suggestions for the humble rubber band and discover some more interesting ways to draw from your rubber band collection.

While I'm a bit skeptical about the suggestion that they could be used as a toddler toilet paper lock, I do love her description of the painted eggs. I remember making these in elementary school, and we used this same technique. It worked really well and was super simple. Stretch elastics around the egg. When you dip the egg in dye, the places where the elastic covered will not get colored. Use different widths and patterns at different stages in the dye process and you'll end up with a really cool looking pattern.

Back to school is upon us and with it comes, among other things, school lunches. There is always the standard of a peanut butter or bologna on white bread sandwich, but that gets boring fast. What can you do to make lunchtime fun and nutritious too? Is there anything else that should go in that lunch box other than food? How do you keep it cold?

Kraft has come up answers to all these questions and more. The Mom's Lunch Box Cheat Sheet has tips for making lunch easy and fun for your kids and has some interesting suggestions for making it easy for you.

On Kraft's Back to School Helper page you will find recipes for quick and nutritious breakfasts. There are fun a tasty twists on the traditional sandwich as well as ideas for what to pack to go with lunch. To top it off there are also after school snack ideas too.

Hopefully you will find some ideas to help you add some tasty variety to your kids school lunches and fill that empty lunch box. Do you have any creative ideas for school lunch to share? Let us and our other readers know in the comments.

When it comes to packing sandwiches, there all kinds of ecologically minded alternatives to baggies, foils, plastic and other disposable wraps. And they all have their drawbacks.

Those cool aluminum boxes, for instance, are kind of pricey. I'm a huge fan of traditional Indian tiffin carriers and Japanese bento boxes, but most don't provide a snug enough fit for a sandwich. There's always parchment paper, although it isn't exactly leak-proof. And while waxed paper bags that are "natural" (unbleached, non-toxic when incinerated, won't contaminate groundwater, etc.) are a convenient alternative, they aren't biodegradable -- and they're still disposable and therefore waste-generating. Most promising, there are high-tech food wraps that are edible, fortified with vitamins and minerals, and/or anti-microbial, but these aren't commercially available, as far as I know.

Oh, the agony!

I'd nearly given up when Jennifershmoo from Vegan Lunch Box turned me on to the Wrap-N-Mat, a reusable sandwich wrap made from a coated fabric that doubles as a placemat when it's unfolded. But the off-gassing smell she reports sounds more than just off-putting. Then along came one of her crafty readers to the rescue, suggesting a DIY version of the Wrap-N-Mat using PUL (polyurethane laminate) fabric that you can purchase to sew your own cloth diapers (so it's supposed to be leak-proof and non-toxic). Something I'm definitely going to try.

Do you have any good sandwich wrap solutions?

I have only recently gotten clued in to the Bento box. Sure, I have seen them before but I was unaware of the depth to them. There are Bento boxes for adults, kids and fancy ones that are practically works of art. There is even a rich history regarding the boxes. There is also a process for packing the boxes.