This past November we donated 20 Refresh Bags to a homeless shelter in Wilmington, DE. Typically we donate the filled toiletry bags to benefit local teens in foster care. Our primary contact at Family and Youth Services for Delaware left the state agency for another job. We weren’t able to find another contact at the state agency who was able to work with us. We also tried working with a local foster/adoption agency, but they also weren’t able to manage the distribution of the Refresh Bags. In the end, we dropped off the 20 Refresh Bags to a homeless shelter, as well as all of the extra toiletry supplies we had on hand to help another forgotten demographic in our community.

In total, we’ve donated 239 Refresh Bags!

A few weeks ago a club at MOT Charter, Engage for Change, reached out to partner with Refresh Bags. The team has offered to manage a donation drive to fill 20 Refresh Bags!

This is a heartwarming partnership, because it’s Delaware teens helping other Delaware teens.

We made the drawstring backpacks which hold the toiletry bags for the club. They will now manage a donation drive at their school to fill the toiletry bags with essential toiletry items, which will then be given to an agency to distribute to teens in Delaware’s foster care.

We’re proud to partner with the team in the Engage for Change club!

We completed the latest round of Refresh Bags this past weekend. When all was said and done, we ended up with 36 Refresh Bags: 24 for teen gentlemen and 12 for teen ladies. I aimed to make 38 during the process, but Lulu the cat ruined one bag with her claws and one bag didn’t turn out too well.

We made the bags uneven between the genders this round because I found a really good deal on Axe Body Spray for Men and Adidas Body Wash for men. And at the end of the day, work is crazy busy, I didn’t want to take on too much to not get this round of bags out to door by adding more ladies bags. With this round complete, we’re now over 200 Refresh Bags complete! In fact, we’re at 219!

Below are a few photos from during the process of making the bags, organizing all of the deliveries of the toiletry items that fill the bags, and all the completed bags boxed up. As always, Refresh Bags are a family affair for us, with help from Carter and Evan all through the process.

We’re in the process of making 36 more Refresh Bags! Our goal coming into this round was to cross the 200 mark of bags delivered to teens in Delaware’s foster care. We’re exceeding 200 easily, we’ll end up with 219 Refresh Bags delivered.

This round got a head start in funding from a donation a little over a year ago from a work colleague.

Here’s where we currently are:
– The fabric has all been cut for the individual bags.
– The items for in the bags have all been ordered.

This round of Refresh Bags is taking a step up in quality of items overall and we’re adding in 7 masks, making each bag’s cost $27.70. We scored a new nice deals on Woot! 70% off packs of men’s Adidas body wash/shampoo/conditioner bottles and Axe body spray/deodorant. Everything else is coming from bulk deals on Amazon. Due to how the quantities were bundled together, we ended up with 24 boy and 12 girl bags.

Wish us luck in getting this round completed and delivered!

We delivered a total of 66 Refresh Bags to Delaware’s Youth & Family Services.  The delivery included 33 Refresh Bags for teen boys and 33 Refresh Bags for teen girls.

As usual, I neglected to take pictures during the drop-off.  I took a few of the bags all boxed up at our house and packed in the cars.  The delivery was too much for one SUV, we had to take two vehicles to make this delivery.

Thanks to the generous donations from a donation and fundraising drive, managed by my two boys, at Caravel Academy — these are the best bags we’ve pulled together!

This set of Refresh Bags are almost magical — the material they are made out of is a super stretchy and durable material that can hold a lot of stuff.  And because this is the first drive where the majority of the items were collected by Delaware teens for Delaware teens.

We haven’t set our next goal for how many the next set of Refresh Bags we’ll deliver, but we will set our goal soon.

The last set of bags we delivered were primarily delivered to teens in independent living homes!

Refresh Bags Almost Complete

The summer has flown by!  We’re getting ready to go back to school and we haven’t gotten out the latest round of Refresh Bags.  😦

The Caravel Academy students had a fantastic fundraiser in May!  They received a ton of products to add to the Refresh Bags and raised $580!  Below are shots of the products that were donated, as well as the products purchased from the $580 in funds.

Donated Products

We used some of the donations as props to hold up items. There’s actually loads of toothbrushes and toothpaste in those props!

Products Bought with $580

The boys products we bought are lined up on the table.

The girls are still in their boxes.

In total, we’ll fill 66 Refresh Bags:  33 for teen boys and 33 for teen girls.  A few bags were lost along this journey.

The crew of students, led by my oldest, Carter Keith, with support from my youngest, Evan Keith, did a fantastic job organizing the fundraising week by making posters, decorating the collection boxes, writing the scripts for the morning announcements and emails, setting up the collection boxes, making daily pickups and organizing the donations.  In total, they collected approximately $1,200 in goods and funds!  Go Bucs!!

Each Refresh Bag contains:

• Shampoo and Conditioner
• Body Wash
• Deodorant
• Toothbrush
• Toothpaste
• Chapstick
• Tissues
• Razors
• Comb or Brush
• Shaving Cream (boys)
• Feminine products (girls)
• Something fun (Scrabble Twist, Playing Cards, Jewelry Making Kit, Journal with multi-colored Pen, Nail Polish, etc.)

The round of donations included a few special surprises:

• A slew of toothbrushes and toothpaste from a local Dentist office, Smile Brite Delaware.
• A corporate match donation from GSK, GlaxoSmithKline.
• A large bag of 100 pairs of Bombas socks!   A great concept — for every pair of Bombas you buy, they donate a pair of socks.
  
  

  

Donation Drive and Purchases Complete — Time to Finish the Bags 

It’s taken me a long time to fully complete the bags.  The students helped get through a good bit of completing the bags.  I fit making Refresh Bags into my schedule as a hobby, focusing on the bags in spurts of time on weekends.

It took me a long time to figure out a solution to a broken sewing machine.  Just as I solved the problem, a new problem popped up — which led me to an even better design of the drawstring backpacks, which I’m excited about.

One of the most important aspects of the bags is they represent permanence.  For a bag to be on the level of permanence, it has to be durable. Most of the bags were already complete with the original design. I believe both designs are sufficiently durable.

The change is in how the string attaches to the bottom corners of the bags.  We tested a few options for this area that can take a lot of beating and weight.  Metal grommets couldn’t hold onto this fabric, so they were out.  We used sewn buttonholes with the two drawstring backpacks we tested for a year.  They held up well, so we started with this method for this large batch of bags.

The hard part is sewing buttonholes is actually pretty challenging.  I’ve been sewing since Home Ec in 8th grade (also from a few Master Classes from my Mom and Nana), it was only until the last few years have I figured out how to do them well.  I had a very determined and open-minded student, Dev, volunteer to sew the buttonholes.  He had never used a sewing machine before.  Dev didn’t get frustrated, he kept on pushing through to get the buttonholes sewn into the corners.  In the end, the machine was brought to its knees.  Crippled to not be able to sew anymore.

Attempted buttonhole.  It’s like an embroidered design.  The tread was getting tangled in the bobbin’s inner workings and the feed dogs.  The machine was a Singer Heavy Duty machine, but it’s really more of a lightweight heavy-duty machine.

Long story short, some bags couldn’t be salvaged to handle a buttonhole, so a new solution arose in the same adage from School House Rock, necessity is the mother of invention.  Born is the new, better looking, and I hope just as durable, ribbon corner!

The ribbon serves a double duty — hides the old corner and holds the drawstring.

And adds a little style to the Refresh Bags.

Both designs have a reinforced bottom corner to help hold the weight of the contents of the bag.

How Durable Are the Bags?

We check for quality during each step of making the bags.  One of the last steps is washing the bags.  A washing machine is talented in pointing out quality issues.

The boy’s bags got all tangled up in the wash.  No fear, they were all untangled before heading into the dryer, now inside out.

Before the washing machine.

After the washing machine.

Next we’ll load the bags to the brim with all of the donated items and deliver them to Delaware’s Youth & Family Services.  Stay tuned!

The next donation drive for Refresh Bags is being managed by Carter and Evan Keith, along with a group of student volunteers, at Caravel Academy during the week of April 29 to May 3, 2019. Their goal is to ask Caravel Academy students and their families to donate either toiletry items to fill the Refresh Bags or donate money, to buy the toiletry items needed to fill the bags.

This round of Refresh Bags is for 35 teen boys and 35 teen girls. The filled bags will be given to the Youth and Family Services division of the State of Delaware.

The items they are gathering are name brand items, such as:

• Body wash
• Deodorant
• Shampoo/Conditioner
• Toothpaste
• Toothbrushes
• Shaving cream (for boys)
• Feminine products (for girls)
• Chapstick
• Tissues
• Comb
• Something fun — like a pack of cards, jewelry making kit, nail polish, electronic Scrabble game.

Every dollar and every item donated to Refresh Bags is put towards filling the bags.  Refresh Bags is a 501(c)(3) organization started in September 2016.  To date we’ve donated over 120 Refresh Bags to teens in Delaware’s foster care, this next batch of 70 will bring us up to 190 bags!

Our goal is to make the teens feel better about themselves and to help to increase their feelings of self-worth.  We purposely hand make each bag to represent permanence, they are made to last a long time.

Thank you for your donation and support of Refresh Bags.  If you’d like to donate now, click here to go to our PayPal donation page.

Thank you!

I decided to make a new kind of bag for the next set of Refresh Bags.  The new design uses stretchy material and the bags don’t have a liner, which means I’m using a serger instead of a sewing machine to make the body of the bag.

Example of a serging stitch — it’s the same type of stitch used to make clothing.  It holds the fabric pieces together and prevents the fabric from unraveling.  The fabric won’t deteriorate from being washed.

The learning curve to learn how to use a serger is steep.  Here’s part of the machine that took me multiple tries over multiple weeks to thread the Lower Looper.

I finally am able to claim victory over this part of the machine!

The fabric is well on its way to becoming Refresh Bags, all of the bodies are serged.

Next steps will be to create the channel the drawstring will go through at the top of the bag and the “buttonholes” in the bottom corners to knot the string in place.  And then the final step of threading the string to complete the drawstring backpacks!

Soon the gathering of donations and items to fill the bag will also kick off.  Stay tuned!

The next round of Refresh Bags won’t be the lined drawstring toiletry bags we’ve been making, instead we are making super- stretching drawstring backpacks.

Background:
We’ve delivered over 120 Refresh Bags so far to teens in foster care in Delaware. Refresh Bags are hand made bags filled with basic, ideally name brand, full-size toiletry items like toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo, conditioner, body wash, Chapstick, deodorant, shaving cream, razors, comb, tissues, and for girl bags, feminine products. They all also include something fun, like a deck of cards, nail polish, jewelry making kits, or a game.

I make the bags by hand with my sewing machines, we raise funds and gather donations to fill the bags. My boys help to determine quantities, source, purchase, organize and fill the bags. Each bag tends to have a value of $12 to $20, depending on sale prices and items available.

The Refresh Bags are typically delivered to Delaware’s Division of Youth and Family Services to be distributed to social workers to deliver the Refresh Bags to teens in Delaware’s foster care system.

New Refresh Drawstring Backpacks:
We’ve tested a double-sided poly stretch fabric that seems to have special powers. When made into a drawstring backpack it keeps stretching and stretching to fit whatever you need to carry in it. We carried a bulky blanket, a winter coat, travel neck pillow, headphones and charger in the bag with no issues.

We’ve cut all of the fabric for 70 bags.

My oldest son and I folded and pinned the bags to prepare them to be serged.

Some of the fun items that will be included in this round of Refresh Bags are ten of each of the Crayola Jewel Maker kits and Scrabble Twist games!

Still to come: serging the sides of the bags, creating the channel for the drawstring and the holes in the bottom corners to secure the ends of the string. And raising funds and gathering donated items!

Stay tuned!

It took us a long time to complete this batch of Refresh Bags, we finally delivered 24 teen girl and 31 teen boy Refresh Bags to the Division of Family Services, a part of Delaware’s Youth & Family Services Department.

I neglected to take pictures of almost everything. I took a few shots of the car filled to the brim with the filled bags just before we delivered the 55 bags.

Our next goal includes changing from toiletry bags to drawstring backpack bags. We’ve successfully tested the fabric and design for a few months, we have plenty of fabric, and now that the previous batch is complete, production can start on the new bags.

The first step will be to cut the fabric. Stay tuned…

Donate to fill the next batch of Refresh Bags.