Making an Easy Hot/Cold Pack with Fabric and Rice

I've made a ton of these super simple but super useful rice bags in the last 5 or so years. They are super easy to whip up as gifts and easy to personalize through fabric choice. In fact, most of the fabric that I purchase "just because" end up going into these bags. Today I'm going to provide you with both a written and video tutorial on how to make my "standard" sized one which is big enough for belly, back, and head while still maintaining "wrapability" for necks, arms, and legs. Yes I made up that word. If you learn more from videos, go ahead and skip to the video.

Materials needed

- Two pieces of fabric cut to 6.5" x 18"

- About 3 cups of rice

Step one:

After you've cut your fabric, join them right sides together and start 1-2 inches in from a corner on a short side and sew all around the rectangle until you've rounded that last corner and are about 3 inches from where you began. Backstitching at the start and the end of your stitching will keep things nice and tight when you go to turn your back right side out.

Step two:

Clip your corners right up to your stitch line, this helps get nice crisp corners when you turn your project and go ahead and turn it right sides out. Take time to press your bag and then top stitch around the 3 completely closed sides. Top-stitching is not essential to most projects but it does two things: provide and extra layer of stitching to strengthen the project and make the finished piece look more tidy.

Step three:

Now we are going to create our pockets for the rice. Some tutorials will have you go ahead and stitch those pockets now leaving slight gaps in the stitching for the rice to fall through but a) it becomes a huge pain to get your rice evenly distributed and b) it will never stay evenly distributed. So I began marking all my lines from this point on but the problem with marking is that you'll have to eventually remove your mark so I have found that if you fold your bag in half, and then fold each half in half, you end up with 4 even sections. Your bag will look like a W from the side and just fiddle with it until all four sections are pretty even and press it with a hot iron. BOOM: your iron provided you with nice even, straight stitching lines that will not need to be removed.

Step four:

Pour roughly 3/4 cup in the opening of your rice bag and let it all fall to the bottom. Here is where a funnel would be super handy but I use (and have used for everyone I make) a funnel made of taped cardstock. Whatever works. You can absolutely adjust this to more or less but I find this measurement gives me a perfect amount to create a full bag without overfilling to the point that sewing it becomes difficult. Next, use your fingers to hold the rice to the side as you stitch down your line you created with the iron. Your machine will NOT be happy if rice gets under the pressor foot so make effort to keep it all to the side. Repeat step 4 until all four sections of your bag are complete

Now all you'll need to do it is clip your threads are you're ready to go. I store our rice bags in the freezer so that they are ready as needed for a cold pack but pop them into the microwave for a minute of two for a heat pad.

Don't forget there is a very unedited video complete with my children's beautiful background ruckus for those that prefer video tutorials.

I hope you enjoyed my first ever tutorial and I plan to have more coming your way very soon. I'm not very technologically literate so please feel free to shoot me your construction criticism. If you consider yourself sewing challenged, please let me know if this tutorial helped. If it didn't, I offer my sincerest apologies and a link to buy a finished rice bag here: