It’s been almost two weeks since Christmas, but I’m still making these therapy bags for friends. They’ve been very well received, too. I’ve taken the advice of some of the comments here and made a pillow sham back for the bag covers, rather than use the Velcro closure. I offset the opening, though, so the stiff rice bag can slide into its cover more easily. I made a cover for the Booboo bag, too, and its pillow sham back opens from short end to short end so the bag can be inserted easily.

When it came to the constructing the rice bag, I sewed channels into it so the contents won’t shift. And I whipped together a drawstring bag in coordinating fabric to keep the therapy set in.

Thanks again for the tutorial! Here is my blog entry about my version:
http://scrapdash.blogspot.com/2008/01/christmas-and-dead-fish.html

Only challenge I ran into was in figuring the amount of essential oil to use. I’m not sure if I just picked very strong scents, or my oil was very fresh and thus stronger.

Geranium is a very strong scent! It’s a good thing the rice isn’t very expensive…for these I ended up replacing the rice for unscented; enough had soaked into the bags overnight that I didn’t add any oil to the replacement rice. The lavender was also very strong, and I ended up using perhaps 1 or 2 drops per bag (I used more to start for the first couple of bags, then ended up just buying more rice and splitting among the four bags I had left to finish). Next time I’ll just go with the lavender – that was the preferred scent by far!

Thanks very much for sharing the tutorial!