Making Vintage Style Play Food

The play kitchen area at our house has seen a great deal of action over the last few years. The food items and play cookware migrate all over the house to be incorporated into other play. So, as it goes, I too spend a great deal of time playing...er... I mean cleaning up the pretend cooking chaos. I have made my share of felt foods and shopping bags in an attempt to off set the plastic and cardboard store bought stuff . I have purchased a wide range of classic dishes and stainless cookware because it pleases me too. But hands down the best things in our play kitchen are a stainless steel bowl, child size vintage hand beater (couldn't find it today) and these bags of flour and sugar. Items that have "real" qualities to them are always a hit with my little people.

To make the bags I used vintage label images printed in mirror image onto Avery T-shirt Transfer Paper. I made traditional square corner sacks out of light weight linen. Crafty Daisies has a tutorial for squaring corners. Muslin or flour sack towels would work well too. I filled my sacks with real flour and sugar which gives them the most splendid feel and weight. A tiny bit of flour dust comes through the material when you smack it. I find this irresistible but you can double bag the flour or use plastic pellets if you do not. I closed the top of the bags on my serger. I then folded down the top 1 inch and ran a straight stitch across the serged stitches to make sure the contents stay in the bag. This is a super quick project and would make a fantastic gift with a bowl and beater or felt cookie dough and rolling pin.

Here are the public clipart images I used plus a few extra. Just click on them and save them to your computer. When you get ready to print, put the images into a PowerPoint or Word document so that you can fiddle with the size. Make sure to select print Mirror Image in your printing properties so that when you iron on the transfers the words will be readable. Drop me an email or leave a comment if you have any questions.

You can find more wonderful labels in Labelstone's Flickr set (check out the dog and cat food). And at Dover Publishing where you can sign up for free weekly clipart images sent via email (wonderful source of vintage poster art and food labels). Or just Google Vintage Food Labels!