Twice a year, our church gives gift bags to those in our city's county jail. At Christmas, it is called "Christmas Behind Bars", and since it was so rewarding and appreciated, we also do "Fourth of July Behind Bars".
We fill the bags with all sorts of goodies, like candy bars, crackers, gum, and several booklets and reading material. Every year we receive several letters from the inmates who are so appreciative of what we do.
Usually we have the kids color and decorate all 250 bags to be given away, but this time we have run short on time to get them finished. What to do? We'll print on them! It still makes a very nice gift bag, and it is certainly better than a plain sack.
To print on the bags is pretty simple, although it can be tricky at times.
I created my design using picmonkey.com. It is free and lots of fun to use. You can also just use your word processor, or photoshop or something similar will also get the job done.
Size your design to fit your bag. I wanted mine tall and narrow, so I sized it to twice as tall as wide.
Copy your image to a word document. In the page settings, put in the measurements of your bag. Mine was 6.25" wide by 12.5" high.
Since the bag needs to be fed into the printer bottom first, the image needs to be flipped and reversed. You can make this change by selecting the image. An edit box will then pop up with these options.
To prevent (or at least greatly reduce) paper jams when feeding in your sacks, go to your print properties and change the media type to "Thicker Paper".
It's a good idea to test out your design by printing on paper first, and then a bag. Make sure everything is just the way you like it, and then print off all you need.
Printing on paper bags can really change it from "drab" to "cool"!
What could you print on a bag?
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