Nursery bag

I like to send my kids to school with a bag, I feel like it says to them they’re ‘going somewhere’ (I know, that sounds really vague and weird) and it gives them somewhere to put their stuff. Now not all the kids who go to the school have bags, the school has a book bag system, although when I say ‘book bag’ they’re really a clear plastic folder with a zip and some of the kids just carry those plus one of those lunch boxes with a handle if they’re having packed lunch, but I always think carrying two things means it’s twice as likely something is going to be lost and/or that’s twice as much stuff I’ll end up carrying. So with Girl Lacer, the lunch box (which actually does have a handle, can’t seem to buy lunch boxes without them these days) and the book bag, both go in her school bag, along with her jumper most of the time and all the pieces of work she brings home at the end of the day (which in reception was alot of junk sculptures, I can imagine how those junk sculptures were juggled for those that don’t have bags and if the kid’s anything like Girl Lacer, the jumper even more likely to end up in lost property).

Now, Boy Lacer starts nursery in a week and with all my praising of the concept of the school bag, I wasn’t planning on sending Boy Lacer in with one, he had a bag for playgroup and he didn’t like it (didn’t even like me carrying it), so we ended up not using it. The bag for playgroup was really something to put spare nappies, wipes and trousers in and eventually I figured playgroup being a playgroup, would have plenty of those items spare. So the concept of Boy Lacer and a bag, I hadn’t really thought about it, other than he doesn’t like bags, I won’t get him one, he after all doesn’t really need one for just nursery, oh yes he does it suddenly occurred to me, as I was throwing out his old bag this morning. Whereas playgroup obviously had plenty of spare nappies etc.,  nursery, where all the children are expected to have been toilet trained, they’re not going to have nappies, so he’d need a bag with nappies in. We are lucky that the nursery is happy to take him in nappies, but I can’t expect them to have everything at hand.

So he needed a bag, even so, he still doesn’t like them, however he does like stuff I make for him and a homemade bag would be cheaper, so it wouldn’t be horrendous if he didn’t like it. But then I had to find a bag design, if he’d been a girl, it’d would have been a tote bag, but boys, that’s more tricky, a back pack was the obvious choice but I couldn’t find any patterns on the web, so I got the piece of fabric I wanted to use (a dinosaur pattern Boy Lacer persuaded me to buy (literally) ages ago) and folded it into various shapes and came up with a simple bag with a flap. I then got some orange fabric I had laying around as a lining and sewed the bag as one piece (the lining and the outer fabric together), all those double rolled hems unfortunately led to two broken needles (oops, which has brought the total of broken needles this week to three, up to this week I had never broken a needle). The flap was closed with a jersey press fastener; I had brought a press fastener kit a while ago, as I didn’t like how the bags I made flapped open and weren’t exactly secure, but hadn’t got round to using it yet. Figuring out how the kit worked was tricky and I initially used the wrong fastener, using an anorak fastener instead, I had wondered what the difference between a jersey and an anorak fastener was, I soon learnt as the anorak fastener ripped out after a few experimental uses.

So, here’s the resulting bag

It’s a little on the snug side, which is good in that I think one of the things Boy Lacer doesn’t like about normal bags, even toddler bags, that they’re too big. I think I may ultimately have to redo the straps to make them bigger but for the moment it fits and most importantly, he really likes it.