The weather is warming up, and that means spring cleaning is sure to start soon. As the outside world transforms, take advantage of this time to revamp your home, especially spaces that are often overlooked. Today we’re sharing how Celestial Gifts can help you organize your closet – one of the most challenging spaces to tidy up. With these tips, you’ll be able to optimize your space and save time in your daily routine.

1. Muslin bags are a great way to keep leather items pristine and organized.

It can be difficult to find a convenient place to store purses and shoes when they aren’t being used. These items are not only bulky, but require special care to protect them from scratches and dust. Place your shoes and purses inside muslin bags when they’re off-season to keep them safe and ready for when the weather changes.

2. If something won’t be used, find somewhere else to store the item.

Winter clothing items like sweaters and scarves are much bulkier than spring wardrobe essentials. They can clutter your closet, especially if they’ll just be sitting for several months. Pulling winter clothing from your closet can free up a lot of space. We like opting for an under-the-bed storage option. You can group together similar items in muslin bags to make your next wardrobe swap quick and easy.

3. Storage bins can help you organize miscellaneous items.

Much like having a “junk drawer” in the kitchen, storage bins give random belongings a home. Instead of having things collect at the bottom or top of your closet, put them in a bin so they’re out of the way until you need them. If you’ve got items that are more delicate, you can wrap them in a muslin bag before you put it in the bin. That way, you’ll still be able to save space but won’t need to worry about placing it in a compact space with other things.

Spring cleaning is a tradition that can be daunting. These tips will make tackling your closet a little bit easier. If you end up trying any of these ideas, let us know! We would love to hear about it.

For guests, wedding season seems far away. For brides-to-be, wedding planning season is in full swing. Most weddings take place in the summer months, and February through April are prime for picking the finishing touches for your special day. Rustic weddings have become more popular over the last few years, and the muslin trend is expected to continue this wedding season. Here are some ways you can incorporate muslin bags in favors and décor.

1. Custom stamped bags of birdseed. A favorite wedding tradition is showering newlyweds in birdseed. This symbolic tradition has potential to be modernized, and using a muslin bag is a great way to do that. Muslin bags are completely customizable to your wedding day, and we like the idea of making the bags personal stamping the bags with your wedding hashtag. A cotton bag full of birdseed is the perfect place to incorporate this modern trend into lasting traditions. Your guests can take the bags home to remember your special day and all the memories created.
2. Give back to your bridesmaids. Your bridal party will offer support throughout the rest of your planning process and of course, on your wedding day. Typically, brides will have special favors for their bridesmaids. Fill muslin bags with beauty products for personal, memorable gifts that show how much you appreciate your girls.
3. Decorate your centerpieces with a touch of muslin. Textiles can make your place settings stand out. More brides are stepping away from traditionally opulent tables, instead opting for more casual receptions. The off-white of muslin will compliment any color scheme and contrasts well with burlap, another common fabric in rustic weddings made popular by Pinterest. One of our favorite ways you can incorporate our bags is by wrapping them around glass centerpieces.
4. Design take-home bags of candy for your guests. Chocolate kisses and candy-coated chocolates are favorites to go in wedding swag bags. You can order custom candy to match the theme of your wedding, or you can customize the bag instead. Finish off the bags with handwritten thank you notes, and you’ll have an easy but thoughtful way to show appreciation to your loved ones who attended.

We know wedding planning can be stressful, but it should be fun, too. These are just a few of our favorite ideas for adding a touch of rusting muslin to your wedding. For more ideas like this, head over our Pinterest board dedicated to weddings.

A couple months ago, we wrote a blog post called Five Things Product Packaging Must Do. This month, we thought we would share why product packaging has become so important for online businesses. Many of the companies we are thankful to work with are online retailers, who have realized the importance of beautiful packaging for their online shops.

Unique product packaging helps you stand out from your competitors.

The age of the Internet makes it easier than ever before for anyone to be an entrepreneur. If you have an idea for a product, you have the opportunity to sell through your personal website, or even bigger marketplaces like Amazon or Etsy. Packaging can be an easy way to differentiate yourself from some of your competitors. If you develop packaging that is unique and impactful, customers will remember your brand better than some of the other options.

Sometimes, product packaging is the only physical touch point a customer will have with your store.

Even though customers are ordering products from you, packaging is sometimes the only way a customer will develop a physical memory or affiliation to your brand. If a customer can’t go in to your store and experience your brand that way, it’s a good idea to bring that experience to them with packaging. You can theme your packaging just as you would theme a store, and your packaging will serve as a lasting reminder of your company. Having your logo stamped on a cotton bag gives your customer something tangible and lasting that relates to your shop.

If customers see you care about packaging, they see you care about your product.

It can be easy to place your product in a padded envelope and stick it in the mail without much thought. But going the extra mile and creating something well-designed for your product makes what you offer more special. It shows that your product is worth more than just the function it serves. If customers can clearly see that you treat your goods with care, they will value your brand more highly.

The start of the New Year brings exciting resolutions. One of the most common and noble goals people set is to live a healthier lifestyle. It’s important to remember that eating healthy can happen in little steps. Today, we’re going to share some ways Celestial Gifts cotton bags can help you to create healthy eating habits.

One of the best ways to improve your eating habits right off the bat is to incorporate more fruits and vegetables and less processed food. Having fresh produce on hand makes it easier to say no to junk food. It’s easy and convenient to pop open a bag of chips sitting in your cabinet. Keeping your fruits and veggies on hand, and keeping them looking and tasting their best makes healthy snack options more appealing. Here are three easy tricks to try.

1. Store produce in bags made of a breathable fabric.

Many fruits and vegetables should be contained in some way, but in a lot of cases should not be completely sealed. Using a muslin cotton bag is the perfect happy medium. The bags protect your food while still allowing the right amount of airflow. Our bags work great for storing produce because they help your fridge stay tidy while maintaining the quality of your food. Bonus: our bags are reusable, and if you bring our bags right to the store to pick your produce, you can save yourself a little time and reduce waste.

2. Take advantage of built-in crisper drawers.

Most refrigerators have crisper drawers, but they can be a little confusing to use. In order for a crisper to work properly, you need make sure the environment is either high humidity or low humidity depending on the fruit or vegetable. Dampening a cloth bag you’re using to store your produce adds the right amount of moisture to crisper bins for nutrient dense vegetables like leafy greens, broccoli, cucumber, and more. It’s good to leave the bag dry for fruits (apples, peaches, pears, etc.) to keep the environment at a low humidity.

3. Don’t be afraid to freeze anything that might not get used.

Sometimes, it can be hard to tell how much produce you’re going to need for a particular recipe. Other times, you may have ended up going out to eat more than expected. Regardless, it’s okay to end up with more produce than you needed. Most fruits and vegetables freeze well. One of our favorite time savers is to chop up a variety of extra vegetables and freeze them together in one bag. It’s easy to defrost and incorporate them into a pot of soup or a pasta dish for an easy healthy meal.

We hope these tips are helpful. It’s never a bad idea to clean up your diet, and stocking your house with fruits and veggies is a great way to avoid temptation. Let us know if you’ve used any of these tips or you have any other tricks you want to share.

Limited Edition Packaging

Now more than ever, people look forward to holiday-exclusive items. If your company is offering limited-edition products for the season, this is a fun opportunity to mix it up with your packaging. We wanted to share with you some tips and tricks to showcase holiday cheer on our cotton bags.

The key to having successful seasonal packaging is to bring back fond memories for the customers who touch your product. Every person has special holiday traditions, but some themes are more universal than others. Here are some of our top tips to keep in mind for what to include in designing seasonal packaging everyone will love.

1. Instead of opting for certain holiday-specific colors, try incorporating metallic shades reminiscent of sparkly decorations. Bonus: you can use this packaging throughout January as well to celebrate the New Year.
2. Everyone loves animals. Polar bears and penguins seem to pop up everywhere around this time of the year, and with good reason! They’re cute and appreciated by everyone.
3. Draw inspiration from winter activities. Simple illustrated graphics are trendy for packaging during the winter months. Try using scarves, mittens, sleds, or snowflakes.

Not every business wants to release seasonal items, but if you do, we’re ready to give you festive packaging to match your products.Our last blog post was all about DIY holiday gift wrapping. Feel free to look at that post for ways to bring these ideas into reality. Another great place to find ideas is our Pinterest page.

If you try some of these packaging ideas, show us on Facebook! We’d love to see your results.

DIY Holiday Gift Wrapping

Everyone loves receiving gifts, but not everyone loves wrapping them. Using paper and tape is fun until you reach your fourth or fifth present. Then it can become tedious and maybe even a little bit boring.

You’ve spent so much time picking the perfect presents – why not create your own wrapping that’s personalized? We thought we would share with you some of our favorite ways you can transform our bags into gift wrapping. These little projects are fun, easy and a nice break from doing the same-old, same-old. The best part is these gift bags are reusable, so your loved one is really getting two presents in one.

Painting

All you need for this one is acrylic paint, brushes of your choosing, and a cotton bag. You can freehand your own designs, or if you want, you could use stencils for a more uniform look. Want inspiration? Check out our Pinterest page for some examples we love!

Dyeing

This method may sound intimidating, but it’s surprisingly easy. You just need hot water, liquid dye you can pick up at any crafting store, and a way to stir the dye. The directions for how to use the dye may vary a little from brand to brand, but we can give you some basic tips. Mix the dye and hot water together according to the box’s instructions. You can use more dye for richer color, or dilute it down for pretty pastels. Once everything is stirred together, you can start dyeing your bags.

Here are a few techniques you can try: dip-dyeing the bottom, mixing a custom shade to dye the whole bag, or even making a watercolor effect by painting multiple shades onto the bag.

Custom stamping

If you’ve got a lot of crafts on your to-do list and don’t want to take on another project, we’re happy to help. We offer custom stamping on a variety of our bags. We’ve done stamping for weddings, parties, and even for product packaging.

If you end up trying any of these wrapping ideas, show us on Facebook! We’d love to see your results.

Organize Your Travel Bags

One of our favorite parts about this time of the year is visiting friends and family. Even though making memories with loved ones is a special part of the holidays, the travelling process is not quite so fun. One of the best ways you can reduce stress is by making sure you’ve got all your road-trip essentials. Whether you’re travelling by plane, car, bus, or boat, having organized bags is key to a smooth trip.

Organizing Carry-On Bags

We recommend using our cotton bags to keep everything in its place in your carry-on. One of our favorite tips is to use a separate bag to wrap your headphones or earbuds. This way, you can make sure they’re tangle-free and protected from other goodies in your bag. Another thing you can do is group similar items in one bag. Separate pens, toiletries, snacks, and any other large categories you can think of. Our bags are also great for concealing some of the things you wouldn’t want floating around in your bag, like a passport or extra cash.

Organizing Suitcases

Packing a carry-on is only half the battle when it comes to travelling. Using some of our larger sized bags, such as 20″ x 20″ bags or 14″ x 16″ bags, can help organize your suitcase effectively. One of the most difficult things to pack is shoes. Tuck your shoes into a muslin bag to protect them from scuffing, and to protect your clothes from any debris that might be on the soles. Clothing is easy to organize in bundles, too. Once your clothing is folded how you like it, group shirts together and pants together. Any other articles of clothing can be organized this way as well. Instead of opening your suitcase and finding clothes scattered everywhere, everything in your bag will have its proper place.

These are just a few ways you can stay organized on your trip so that when you arrive, you’re relaxed and ready to celebrate.

Five Things Product Packaging Must Do

The simple muslin bags we create here at Celestial Gifts are ideal for product packaging. We find that businesses small and large are turning to us to create custom stamped and even custom sized bags for their packaging needs. These businesses have made us think more and more about our work and why simple, cotton muslin bags are such a powerful packaging material.

This article from Forbes about five things product packaging must do is an interesting read. It confirms some of the reasons we think Celestial Gifts bags are great packaging. According to Forbes, your packaging should stand out while also being very simple. It should pass the “five-year-old test.” That is, if you can describe your brand to a five-year-old, send them into the store to buy your product, and they’re able to get it, then your packaging is hitting the mark. “For example, you could tell a five-year-old, to get the salt pack with the girl in a yellow coat with an umbrella on it; she will come back with Morton Salt,” says Forbes.

Celestial Gifts muslin bags fulfill these characteristics of great packaging:

Cotton bags automatically stand out from the crowd.

In our culture of throwaway packaging, it’s not too often that you see a product packaged in cotton. A cotton bag lends your product another level of quality and interest.

Cotton bags are simple.

They harken back to a simpler time, when things were made well and constructed from simple, pure materials.

Custom stamped bags pass the “five-year-old test.”

Stamped designs are inherently bold, graphic and simple. The medium demands it. Take a look at some of the designs in the photo above. The images are very simple and striking—the Morton Salt girl would fit right in here!

When we started out making our cotton muslin bags, we weren’t thinking about things like packaging strategy and brand recognition. We were just following our gut that these neat little bags were useful in lots of ways. Our customers continually teach us new uses for our bags and new ways to incorporate them into all kinds of businesses. If you are using Celestial Gifts bags in your business, let us know how you are using them!

Nothing says thoughtful like a care package. Now is the time of year when we get our flu shots, remind our kids to wash hands often, and vigilantly guard against colds and flu. Celestial Gifts muslin bags are perfect for delivering to your family, friends or students their cold season wellness kit. Here are some ideas for how to pack your care package:

Chapstick
Vitamin C
Cough drops/throat lozenges
Airborne
Hand sanitizer
Hand lotion
Herbal tea
Healthy snacks
Mini pack of tissues
Gummy vitamins
Dried soup packet
Home remedies

Some of these items could be purchased in travel/sample sizes, like the tissues and hand lotion. Others, like the tea and dried soup packets might even be single serving items you have on hand in your own cupboard.