Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Custom Back to School Snack Bags


Hello Back to School! My daughter officially started last week so we are four days in to packing lunches and snacks and I'm already bored with writing her name on the snack bags.  Her lunch goes in her lunch box but for her morning recess she can take a small snack if she wants to and that is supposed to go in a small lunch bag labeled with her name. As I was writing her name on her bag again this morning I thought there has to be a better way to do this, definitely at least something a bit cuter and more fun.

I had played around with printing directly on lunch bags before for her soccer team so I thought why not do that again. I wanted to add some cute pictures and the Digital Stamps from the Teacher Card Kit addon from Studio Calico immediately came to mind.

I want to share how easy it is so you can start printing on your lunch bags too. I'm using Photoshop Elements 12 here but this could easily be done in a word processing program too.

1. First things first measure your lunch bags, I'm using the small regular sized brown Kraft lunch bags and they measure 5" wide by approximately 10 3/4" tall.

2. Lay out a document that is the same size as your bag so you know where to place your graphics and/or text and add in some guidelines.  My guidelines are placed at roughly 4" down from the top and 8" down from the top.



It is best to make sure that the printed text and image are placed above the fold line for the bottom of the bag by a good inch. I found on my specific printer if I get too close to that fold I get some excess smearing of the printer ink as its feeding through. I also printed my images on the same side as the bottom fold because there is a seam on the backside of my bags that got hung up when the printer was passing over the bag.

3. Once you have your document laid out pick out your digital elements and start laying it out. I really loved the glue bottle so that was the first one I played with. I decided on the size and placement and then added in my text.  The fonts I used for the bags shown in the image above are Orange Juice, Hello Kid Marker and AMPlayful which is a font I purchased for my Silhouette from the Silhouette store.


4. Because of the direction my printer prints and because I wanted to feed the solid edges of my bags into my printer first I had to flip my design before printing. I just grabbed both layers and with my move tool selected I rotated the image so that it was upside down and aligned with the bottom guideline.


5. Next I set up a custom print size for my printer (which is an Canon Pixma MG5320) so that it matched the size of my bag. I did this right from Photoshop Elements when I hit print I just selected Change Settings and Advanced Settings which brought up my Printer Properties Menu. I selected the Page Setup tab and then selected Custom from the page size drop down menu and entered in my measurements.


6. I placed the bag in the bag feed tray where I normally feed in my photo pager and hit print.  Here you can see better the side I printed on and the spacing above the fold.


I hope you give it a try, the possibilities truly are endless and here's a look at the bag I made for my daughters soccer team, I found the white lunch bags at Michael's and loved printing in color on the white background.


See you soon!
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2 comments:

  1. I would never, in a million years, thought of running bags through the printer! This is an awesome idea!

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