Buy Nothing Back-to-School and Lunch Bag Tutorial

This post revised 9/10/09 after I made two more bags and found some areas that could use clarification. New additions in italics, new photos are in cowboy or jungle fabric.

Before M started kindergarten, I dutifully did what my mom did every August--I trooped to Target and bought all of the school supplies from the list the teacher mailed to our house, loaded up on jeans and t-shirts and searched out the perfect lunchbox. To my surprise, I found that they no longer make lunchboxes; instead they supply an endless array of thick, bulky insulated coolers (honestly, when did peanut butter and jelly sandwiches suddenly require insulation?).

I had visions of M walking to school (which is ridiculous since we live five miles away) with his metal Superman or Scooby Doo lunchbox dangling from his hand, banging against his knee, the way I did when I was a kid. I had a metal Holly Hobby lunch box, with the matching thermos and my banana sticker collection in the lid. In second grade I forgot it on the playground and it got stomped (by an eighth-grader, I was sure) and from then on I carried my lunch to school in brown paper sacks (except on those most humiliating days when we ran out of my bags and I had to take my lunch in a clear Safeway produce bag).

We already had a couple of insulated coolers which I had bought when he was a baby, so for the last two years he has taken is lunch in those. Last year I resisted the back-to-school shopping urge altogether--M never wore any of the jeans I bought in kindergarten (he has a very particular sense of style, which is based not on fashion, fit or cleanliness, as far as I can tell) and though I remember acutely the agony of sitting outside his kindergarten classroom while he went through screening that first day, and watching all of the kids go by wearing there shiny new shoes and clothes, knowing M was inside in a ratty t-shirt and shorts (because it was still too warm to wear those new jeans even if he would wear them) and old sneakers, I know that the time to buy kids new shoes in Maine is in spring, when you can actually wear them for several months, not in the fall when they will soon be supplanted by snow boots. I didn’t need to buy any first grade supplies--he re-used his pencil box and scissors from kindergarten and I have a whole stash of unopened boxes of crayons, markers and colored pencils because for some reason we often get school supplies as gifts, and because pencils are the new candy (at Halloween, Christmas and Valentine’s) we will never have to buy pencils again.

This strategy worked again this year--my back to school shopping consisted of a pack of shoelaces (for the shoes I bought him last spring--an exemption in the Buy Nothing Year rules) because one broke (damn organic cotton) and a box of tissues for the classroom. However, I did want to replace the old insulated lunchboxes which were starting to fall apart, were getting kind of snargy and are probably made out of lead-filled PVC (although why this suddenly matters after having used them for 7 years I have no idea). I wanted something machine-washable, non-bulky when empty and big enough to hold a couple of plastic sandwich containers with room to spare. Because this is Buy Nothing Year, and because I’ve never seen anything that was exactly what I wanted (although I did briefly lust over this and this), I decided to make it myself, using all materials I had on hand.

I know this isn’t a craft blog, but I’m going to show you how I made it in case you get inspired to make your own (skip to the bottom to see the final picture if you're not inspired):

Materials:

Outside fabric 1/3-1/2 yard

Lining fabric 1/3-1/2 yard

Strap fabric (can be cut from lining fabric if desired) scrap at least 4" wide by 20" long

Cord (I used cotton clothesline) about 40"

Heavy Duty Zipper at least as long as top width (it's OK if it is longer; just tuck the end in the lining)

Thread

Seam allowance: 1/2 inch unless otherwise noted

Construction tip: Even though the instructions aren't written this way, I do all of the cutting first, then all of the ironing, then all of the sewing.

Get started: Determine your desired finished size. Mine is roughly 11 inches wide at the top, 7 inches wide and 4 inches deep at the bottom and 7 inches tall. Cut one rectangle from each outside and lining fabric (A=outside; B=lining) measuring: 2 x top width + 1 -by- height + 1/2 depth + 2 (my rectangles measured 24" wide x 13" high)










Outer BagHandles: Cut two strips of fabric 2 inches wide by about 20 inches long (you can vary this depending on your desired handle length). Fold in half lengthwise; iron. Open up and fold edges in about ¼ inch; iron. Cut two pieces of cord about 18 inches long (or 2" shorter than your fabric strips) each. Lay along inside fold of fabric strips; fold over fabric along length; fold ends under about 1/4 inch twice; sew along length. Sew to sides of bag (I placed mine about 3 inches in from the edges and 4 inches down from the top; and sewed from 1 ½ inches down to the bottom edge of the handle), reinforcing several times along the length (once at the bottom of the handle, once at the beginning of the seam and once in the middle of the two).

Zipper: (Note: I used a heavy-duty zipper that was a couple of inches longer than I needed; a properly-sized zipper would probably be neater. Also I just made this up as I went along; if you know how to actually do zippers, you should just skip this part and do it your way).

Sew a small square of fabric at the top (open) end of zipper.

Find center of outside fabric (A) top; align with center of zipper (right sides together) and pin.

Align one edge of zipper with top edge of bag on one side. Pin.

Repeat with other edge.

Pin around bottom and side of bag (Fabric A; right sides together). Sew around bag from bottom corner.

When you reach the top corner, fold fabric into a box shape to align with zipper.

Sew along sipper fabric and around both ends. (Yes it looks like hell, but will be hidden by the lining!) There is probably a better way to do this.

Now take the bottom corners and pull the fabric apart to form a triangle. Sew across the bottom of the triangle where it is your desired bag depth (4 inches across--that is, the longest side, or hypotenuse, of your triangle). Repeat on the other corner.










This gives you a square bottom. Turn fabric A right side out.
Lining

Pockets: I put two pockets inside my bag, a wide one for a napkin or lunch money and a tall one for a fork or spoon. Cut fabric A desired pocket size (mine are about 4" x 7"; one tall, one wide); iron down ½ inch along top and ¼ inch along sides and bottom. Fold top edge under 1/4 inch, then 1/2 inch, sew down. Place on fabric B at desired location (centered on half of bag, about 5 or 6" up from bottom edge) and sew around sides and bottom.










With right sides together, sew along bottom and side of lining; repeat square bottom, as in outer bag. Iron down ½ inch along top edge of fabric B and place inside fabric A (wrong sides together).

Align seams and pin to zipper fabric all around the edge. At the bottom end of the zipper, I had extra fabric, which I folded into a pleat.

Sew all the way around.









It turned out exactly how I wanted, in terms of size and functionality. A better zipper technique might make it look a little cleaner at the top, and reinforcing all of the seams (which I didn’t do) would probably make it more durable. Now I just have to figure out what to put in it that M will actually eat!!

E and Z required a place mat to eat their lunch over, so I sewed a rectangle of outer fabric to a rectangle of solid fabric, right sides together, leaving a 2-3" gap, flipped it right side out and top-stitched around the edge.

One Shirt, Two Shirt, Red Shirt, Blue Shirt

This weekend I read an essay in a certain over-the-top baby-as-fashion-accessory mommy magazine (that shall remain nameless but is named after a dessert traditionally served with a glass of milk) about a mom's conflicted feelings about sending her child to kindergarten or holding him back. She mentioned the argument (founded or unfounded) that kindergarten is more academically rigorous now and that many schools encourage kids to be held back a year and that "all" it costs is another year of paying for pre-school, when it struck me (she did not address any societal implications) that the drive for more academic kindergarten ("the new first grade") coupled with the encouragement of holding kids back (or forced hold-back for very early cut-off dates) equals basically eliminating kindergarten, which not only puts us on equal footing with New Hampshire (which, I have heard but cannot substantiate, does not require school districts to provide kindergarten), but also increases the burden on families that cannot afford that extra year of preschool (or any preschool at all), and puts those children at even greater disadvantage. It also increases the burden on school districts--already cash-strapped and overwhelmed--that have a high proportion of families that cannot afford private preschool to provide pre-kindergarten. To me it appears to be a subtle, sneaky erosion of the promise of education for all. And it stinks.

But I was happy to read this from a levelheaded Mamazine contributor and this from Slates about the downsides of "redshirting." Time for a Kindergarten counter-revolution.

A room of my own

Yesterday, I spent the first blue sky sunny day in a loooong time indoors organizing my desk. That is the spot that is always last in line for any type of houseworkerly attention and it had accumulated crap to a dangerous degree--it usually becomes the free cell when I’m cleaning the rest of the house. I don’t have any before photos, but suffice it to say it was scary. (I had cleaned every inch of the house before my parents visited--except the desk, which collected everything that I cleaned up from everywhere else.

As part of the effort, I cleaned out my drawer in the filing cabinet to eliminate the dust-gathering archives and make it a more usable space for storing and retrieving papers I use on a regular basis. In the cabinet, in addition to all my college papers and high school swimming ribbons, I found a journal I kept while on internship in Idaho and after reading it I wish I’d written more while I was there. I also found a journal from my sophomore year in college and after skimming through some of it, I wish I’d written less--it is filled with impassioned budding-environmentalist rants about meat-eating and general earth destruction, budding-feminist rants about how women don’t need men, alternating with agonized soliloquies about unrequited love for a certain male member of the student body, and a fair amount of vague dissatisfaction with life and time lines trying to chart my course and figure out what I’m going to do with my life. This latest appears to continue to be an affliction of mine. I hope I don't look back on my blog posts in 15 years and feel the same degree of nausea (I also hope my writing skills have improved along with my handwriting).

Anyhoo, back to the desk--it’s not a room (it's in a corner of the living room--the first thing you see when you walk in the door), but it is a space and I am determined to not let it become the crap-piling-up-place again. As you can see in the photo, it now holds only tools I need for writing: a lamp, a cup of pens, my writing technique books (for inspiration) and my notebook at a jaunty angle in the middle. Down on the floor, I placed a stolen toy basket and put pending craft project materials in it, so I have no excuse to not knit that fabulous Noro yarn. I usually write in bed, and will probably continue to do so (although this weekend I had the opportunity to write on a park bench overlooking Rockland Harbor and it was lovely) but now at least I can’t use the chaos and disorder around me as an excuse to not get to work.

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New post up today at Capital Walks .

Wherefore art thou, Summer?

We survived our mostly-rainy five days in the woods. The climax of the trip had to have been the double-poopy-pants Friday night (probably not such a good idea to take two barely-potty-trained three-year-olds to a place where the only toilet is eight feet deep). After that, things got much better—the sun came out, we got to hang out at the waterfront all day instead of being forced on slippery death-marches.

Highlights of the week:

Seeing M fishing, standing up in a canoe, wearing full camo pants, jacket and hat. "He looks like he was born at Orvis," I told C.

M being awarded his Junior Ranger by Ranger Gabe (after much agonizing over his imperfect penmanship and drawing skills—where did I get such a perfectionist child? Lord knows I do everything half-assed).

E pointing out EVERY mushroom on our various hikes—“Nunner mushoom! Two mushoom! Fee mushoom! Yedow mushoom! Oranga mushoom! Fairy table! Fairy chair!”—there are A LOT of mushrooms out there, thanks to this relentless rain. I never appreciated how varied in shape, color and size they were before.

Z and E yelling at a guy who got out of his canoe and touched the tail of a garter snake that had come out to sun on the rocks: “No touch snake!!” “No kill snake!!”

Picking (and eating) wild blueberries. Z always picks (and saves) some for me.

Reacquainting with old friends

Lots of good food.

The inside of the tent staying dry.

I didn’t realize how very lovely it was, being out there in the wildness, until we drove into Augusta and stopped to eat pizza at a damp picnic table outside of Al’s pizza, listening to the cars driving by, looking at the ugly strip malls, hearing C’s cell phone ringing off the hook already, watching my kids run across a metal bridge to nowhere that spans a stormwater overflow ditch.

And now with the start of school bearing down on us I’m starting to feel nostalgic for summer. What with visitors and vacations, it’s flown by so fast, like a French train (not like Amtrak, with its delays and late departures that rail line is more akin to winter), that I feel like I’ve missed it. I never even bought my bag of limes and bottle of tequila, we’ve only been to the beach once and I haven’t spent any time engaged in my favorite summer activity, lolling in the hammock with a stack of books and a large glass of limeade. Is it too late to re-wind to April and call a do-over?

Nature Newts

This morning I walked the boys over to Kiddie Korner so I could spend the day getting ready for our camping trip. M rode ahead on this bike, down the right side of the road—ride to a driveway, stop & wait, ride to the next driveway, stop & wait. On the left side, I pushed Z on the tricycle that badly needs oil, “scree, scree, scree,” and E walked ahead of us, then behind, carrying his Big Brady Doggy. I glanced back to check his progress every now and then and one time I saw him holding something red and leggy in his free hand—and Eastern newt eft (I looked it up later), bright orange with fluorescent red spots. We all looked at and admired it. M came back from his driveway to see (“It looks like it glows in the dark!”).

When I suggested we let it go back in the grass, E jumped up and down crying. I asked him what he wanted to do with it. “Take it home. Put in ‘tainer.” I suggested we take it to Kiddie Korner to show the other kids and he agreed, but when I suggested I carry it myself he pointed out that I needed to push the tricycle. So I took his doggie and showed him how to cup the salamander in his palms so as not to squish it and keep it from jumping/falling to the ground. He carried it all the way to daycare and showed it off to the other kids in the playground and then, without complaint, let M (who carried it on an open palm and kept dropping it) take it to the edge of the woods and let it go. “Find own mommy,” E said, and it’s a good thing newts aren’t strongly attached to their mothers or this one would have a very long walk back to find his.

I’m just starting to come around to the idea of “sacrificial nature”—letting my kids handle, and possibly destroy, plants and animals for the greater purpose of steeping them in the wildness around them and so they gain a greater understanding of and appreciation for nature through hands on experience of life and death. It does not come easily to me—I quake while they poke at or shake the katydid in the bug jar, or carry around and drop a spotted frog (leopard or pickerel? I’m not sure). Eventually I intervene and release the poor agitated creature. I tried to bite my tongue last week as M tore fronds from the ferns all along our hiking trail, but I finally suggested he leave some there for the animals. And though I am deeply bothered by caged animals, especially wild animals, I am considering setting up a terrarium so that we can enjoy and observe our finds for a few hours or days before releasing them. As much as I hate to see an amphibian die of internal wounds inflicted by my child, I would hate even more to turn nature into a hands-off world that my children lose interest in because they have been told, “don’t touch,” “don’t run,” “don’t climb,” “watch out,” “be careful,” too many times.

On the walk home from daycare I noticed several salamander carcasses flattened and dried to the pavement—all the rain we’re having (keep your fingers crossed that it will pass us by on our camping trip) must have them out migrating. I guess there are worse fates than being loved to death by a couple of three year olds.

Potholders

So I had this teeny-tiny meltdown last night...we had just come off a two-week marathon of visitors (my parents and my youngest brother and sister--age 17 and 19--remind me to write a post sometime about how scared I am of having three teenage boys in the not-so-distant future) followed immediately by two dear friends and their darling children, winding down with going to a party where I knew no one and hiking with another friend Monday.

So lets just say by last night I was tired, SOOOO tired, and I was feeling kind of discouraged about how much we cheated on the modified 100-mile diet while we had visitors and about how C keeps using the white flour, which is only supposed to be for bread, for other things and about how we are going on a 4-day camping trip next week and how I really just want to buy spaghetti sauce in a jar (horrors!) and brownie mix (shocking!) and not spend the entire week eating homemade granola that has nothing in it because nothing GROWS here.

Then I just happened to notice one of our totally gross, grungy, baked-on, caked-on, slightly singed potholders sitting on the counter and I lost it. "I quit!" I told C. "I quit the 100 mile diet and the buy nothing year!" I was ready to run out to the health food store and buy a pair of those lovely, luscious potholders made from handwoven fabric from Guatemala. I mean, really go crazy (the only thing that saved me from this horrifying breach is the fact that the health food store was already closed, and I was so, so tired). Instead I crawled into bed with a cup of tea (Sleepytime--not chamomile from my garden because the seeds never even sprouted!!)

As I looked at my book choices for the evening--a collection of short stories by returned Peace Corps Volunteers or "Writing Fiction" by Janet Burroway, I thought of something M said to me last week while I was giving him his bath. He was demonstrating to me how the could hold his breath under water while I counted out loud. I counted to seven. He said that he could have held it longer, but he was going for seven.

"Why didn't you try for 10?" I asked.

"I don't have to be this Master Kid, you know," he replied.

Ah-ha! Perspective. I spend so much time trying to be more creative, trying to lessen my impact on the earth, trying to cook fantastic meals, trying to do all of these things that are all worthy and good, but if they wear me down to the breaking point, something's amiss. I don't have to be this Master Human, you know. It's OK to buy spaghetti sauce in a jar once in a while, or a sliced loaf of bread, or to daydream about nice potholders. And it's OK to read something that will in no way better me as a person. So I took an old-fashioned suspense novel off the shelf (and by old-fashioned I mean vintage 1960s Mary Stewart) and settled in with my tea and my slightly eased conscience.

The Second 100 Miles

Last summer, mostly just to see if we could (and also it’s good for the planet, your health, blah, blah, blah), we practiced a modified version of the Hundred-Mile Diet, and from July 1 through the end of September, attempting to eat only food grown/processed/produced in Maine. I had a lot of personal growth experiences that had to do with making peace with beets, finding and making peace with raw milk, and figuring out (duh) that back when people made their own butter and jam and bread and cheese, they did not also go sit in offices eight hours a day. I will probably devote a whole zine to our experiences some day.

In any case, we’re trying it again, chugging toward week 2. This year I’ve allowed some exemptions up front: coffee (b/c C would buy it anyway), necessary ingredients (e.g. vinegar for pickles, pectin for jam, yeast for bread, baking soda/powder, etc.), oil (because we ran out of both olive and safflower in the same week last summer and, unbelievably, it turns out not everything tastes good fried in butter), all-purpose (white) flour (because I am going to pick myself up off the can’t-bake-a-loaf-of-bread-to-save-my-life dust and try again) and lemons (because I don’t want to go a whole summer without lemons, dammit, plus a lot of vegetables just taste good with a little lemon juice).

I was going to start after my family left mid-July, but since their trip got delayed I decided to plunge in and start July 1 again, almost as unprepared as last time (last year we returned from a three-week vacation June 30 and started the diet the next day). And somehow I’m not managing to muster a lot of enthusiasm this year. The first week we mostly subsisted on what was left in the house and a whole mess of strawberries from our recent pickings, but by yesterday I was feeling a lot like I did during the first mile of my long bike ride—ready to turn around and go home. I was hungry (we were out of bread, eggs, fruit and our garden is in a lull between spring greens and everything else), tired, hot, cranky and my kids were downright mad that all we have is granola and not Shredded Spoonfuls or Shredded Oats or Puffins on offer in the mornings (they make up for it with bowls of Frosted Flakes at daycare—oi!) I was feeling like I was making my family suffer just so everyone else can go on living their gluttonous lifestyles.

I went to the bakery for bread (really I’m going to learn how to bake bread this summer!), but they only had one loaf of white. Instead I bought myself a croissant sandwich with tapenade and a chocolate no-bake cookie (major cheat…but like I said, our cupboard was bare) and went to the local health food store where I picked up bread and a few acceptable exceptions (flour, lemons, yogurt starter). I picked up milk and maple syrup from the milk farm and eggs from the egg farm on the way home and I felt better when I got there and C had made pizza (with the last of the mozzarella—until the farm makes more, or until I try my hand at cheese). This morning I decided to make some milk that had gone a bit off into yogurt and kefir, I put it on to heat up, left the room and came back to find it had come to a boil and separated into curds—perfect paneer without even trying! During my lunch break today I went out into the sticky, hazy, ozone-y, particle-y, mid-Atlantic-style weather and drove to the farmer’s market. There I purchased tomatoes (already!), new potatoes, cauliflower, cucumbers, zucchini (this summer’s personal growth project, other than the bread-baking: make peace with squash), kale and cinnamon rolls.

There in that hot parking lot I crossed the first road, the pedaling became easier, I started listening to the birds…I think I’m enjoying the ride, and I can’t wait to eat!